We have a crabby neighbor. She's in her 60s with a little yappy dog. She lives alone and it's been years, as far as I know, since she's had visitors other than her lawn service. She has disliked our children since we moved in.
On one side of her house there is a little strip of land owned by the town of Gladlyville. She mows it, but it's not her property. Kids play there sometimes, since it's public property in a neighborhood of tiny lots, and she is always unhappy about it. Once when Alex was 10 or 11 he was out there at dusk on a June evening. He was standing on the edge of the lot, trying to catch a firefly in his hands. "Don't touch my flowers," she snapped at him.
(He was not touching her flowers.)
I have tried periodically to be neighborly. I sometimes wave or say hello when I see her, because my mama taught me that neighbors acknowledge each other, but she doesn't respond. Once I gave her a bag of beautiful homegrown tomatoes. We had a brief not-unpleasant conversation about one of the foster dogs, and I wondered if it might open a door to a more cordial relationship, but it has not done so. One night she attended a Zoom Bible study on her porch and I prayed sincerely for her to find love and freedom.
I might need to pray some more.
Tonight I met a friend for a long chatty walk. It was delightful, you guys -- a leisurely bare-faced conversation with one of my favorite people. I got home right as we were sitting down to dinner, and the kids told me the following tale:
They set up a mini-badminton net in the empty lot, and were batting a shuttlecock back and forth. Our neighbor came home, and put her yappy dog on its line. The line, however, allows the dog to run off the neighbor's property and onto the the empty lot, where it charged at Stella, scratching her leg and trying to bite her.
The neighbor's response: "I'm sorry that your parents can't afford more yard space for you."
I MEAN. I cannot EVEN. My EVENER is incapacitated and may not recover for some time.
Pete said, "It's probably good that Mom's not home, because she would go marching right over there." Elwood says we should give her 24 hours to see if she thinks better of it and apologizes. Part of me wants to say, sure, let's give it 24 hours and see if her house spontaneously turns fuchsia and starts spewing rainbow paisley unicorns out the chimney too.
And yet.
I believe that Jesus looks with tenderness on her lonely scowly life, and he is not asking me to muster the zingiest possible response here. I am not sure, though, what he might be asking me to do.
I googled her after dinner. I wanted to check the county records to make sure that she hadn't bought the empty lot, and I was also curious about what kind of online footprint she might have. I wasn't certain that her Facebook page was definitely hers, because she is smiling broadly in her profile picture and I have never once seen her smile, not in 16 years of living across the street from her.
She is active in the altar guild at her Lutheran church. She went on a mission trip to Kenya with them in 2016. She posted a picture of Mother Teresa with the following advice: "Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile."
It's good advice, huh?
There is a line I have often thought about in the letter to the Romans. It says, "As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone." The thing I didn't see clearly when I was younger is that the absence of conflict isn't always the same as peace. Stella is uninjured aside from a light bruise, so I don't see a need for vigorous follow-up (though you can be certain that I'll be taking a picture and saving it, just in case). There is something to be said for a sober conversation -- or a note might allow for more reflection -- in which we say "It is deeply un-neighborly to respond to a child whom your dog has injured by casting unwarranted aspersions on her parents' financial decisions. We trust you will keep both your dog and your tongue under tighter control in the future." But does that just make it into a Thing when it doesn't really need to be a Thing?
The thing I am chewing on as I wrap up this post is the sneakiness of hypocrisy. She must think of herself as a Good Christian, right? She is posting on FB about the importance of in-person church and the enduring truth of the gospel and going to Kenya to share the love of God, even as she is reluctant to aim a sprinkle of the love of God at the kids across the street. And I am not quite sure what comes next in our relationship, but I am praying earnestly for eyes to see where I need to do better myself.
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