I finally saw the mystery neighbor.

Yes, we have a mystery neighbor. Last summer our long time neighbors to the east, with three teenage boys found themselves expecting a fourth child. They decided to sell the house, which they had just finished remodeling. I’m pretty sure the main reason was that they couldn’t put up with my lax lawn care standards, but that’s another story.

So they sold the house in the late fall and moved out. I have not seen a human being over there since. I see an occasional light on. The driveway gets shoveled. I’ve seen cars parked on it, but rarely. Last weekend I saw a bedraggled English sheep dog in the yard. When the old neighbor told me about the sale, she described a couple with high end jobs, one was a patent attorney, I think, which surprised me because folks like that usually live on the other side of 169 in Plymouth. Which is where they were moving from. However recent local scuttlebutt says that it’s a single mom. Putting two and two together, or one and one apart, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a divorce situation.

Yesterday, I was home at noon for my usual lunch and twenty minute nap, which was interrupted when Quinn came home from school, having ditched the pep fest in favor of shopping. She was sitting at the counter eating lunch and I was in the kitchen trying to strike up a conversation before I went back to the office. She suddenly blurted, “Oh my god, there’s someone on the deck.” Call me paranoid, but I thought she meant that there was an intruder on our deck, about to crash through the sliding door and murder us. But when I looked out the glass doors I saw a woman on the deck next door, smoking a cigarette. For some reason, I thought I would be invisible to her, behind that glass on a sunny day. But our eyes met and rather than acknowledge her, I stepped back out of her line of sight. Great way to start things out with the new neighbor, if that’s what she was. I’m sure she’s already thinking of me as that nosey old bastard next door. Or maybe she’s thinking, “Wow, I moved in next to an incredibly sexy man!”