Like a weird neighbor?
For the second year in a row, the front yard of a house around the block from ours is plain black loam.
This in a mostly green, well-kempt neighborhood where lawncare can sometimes feel like a low-level competition.
The “dirt yard” — as we call it — came about after a City of Davenport crew last summer mowed several feet of grass and weeds that had been left to grow wild, following up with a steep $250 charge for the work completed.
In a fit of pique at this outrage, the homeowner literally ripped out every piece of grass in his front yard, turning the green space into a black hole of sun-baked dirt.
Wait, it gets weirder.
The rest of the summer and into the fall the homeowner (whom I have not met) spent HOURS sitting cross-legged in the dirt yard, typically in a sleeveless white tee-shirt and sometimes a fedora, using a tiny trowel to dig. We don’t know if he’s pulling weeds, planting potatoes or clearing out rocks, but we do know he is not bringing grass back. This has carried on into this spring, only now there are what look like possilbe furrows in the soil.
This Quixotic gardening project has been the subject of bemused wonder in our household and across the neighborhood. I, for one, embrace eccentricity in all harmless forms.
Think back across the span of your life - every neighborhood has that “weird neighbor,” no?
When I was a kid living on the East Side of Madison, the man next door filled the role. I can’t remember his name now - it was Mr. Olson or Mr. Pitkowski or some other quintessentially Wisconsin surname. Anyway, Mr. Olson was a widower and a curmudgeon and he didn’t look fondly upon youth or their shenanigans. Many a wiffle ball was lost after rolling under his redwood deck, we neighborhood hooligans too afraid to risk his wrath and retrieve it.
In retrospect, Mr. Olson was most likely a perfectly normal, average guy. But he had a decidely Boo Radley-esqe reputation among us kids.
We moved off that block when I was 10 to a house less than a mile away. There, too, we had “weird neighbors.” In this case, it was a clan of slighly feral juvenile delinquents with a harried single mom that worked the night shift, leaving them free to run wild, cranking Motley Crue and Dokken tunes while engaging in light vandalism and misdemeanor burglary. They weren’t the world’s brightest criminals: once when my parents were out of town they broke into our house and stole a polished rock collection and my Frogger game. True story. We are convinced the only nourishment they took in was Pizza Pit pizza - every Monday their garbage can overflowed with 20 or more empty, grease-stained boxes.
The weird neighbor after my wife and I moved into a house in Bettendorf was a Scandinavian dermatologist who waited until twilight to mow and even then wore a massive sunhat, long sleeves and pants and sometimes a kerchief over his face. That guy really hated the sun.
To be clear, I am not using “weird” as a pejorative here. Variety is the spice of life, as they say.
Besides, I’m starting to think maybe *I* am the new weirdo in our neighborhood (or at least striving to achieve dirt yard guy status.)
The night of the Donald Trump conviction (Glory be!) - inspired a bit by the celebratory neat bourbon I downed no doubt - I decided to express my First Amendment right to political speech by gently tagging my MAGA-lovin’ backyard neighbor’s Trump sign with a PostIt note.
My handiwork:
Yes, under cover of darkness and wearing a diguise, I slapped a couple “felon” stickies on the neighbor’s paen to the worst president in American history. My wife says this is definitely “weird neighbor” behavior, but I think it just makes me a patriotic American!
If I were truly deranged, I would have stalked out the scene of the “crime” the next morning to gauge the reaction my low-level defacing provoked. But I’m not that far gone yet.
I say we celebrate the weirdos and wackadoodles that inhabit our shared living spaces. After all, we’re all a little nuts aren’t we?
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