Neighborhood rotation

Few things can impact your quality of life more than problematic neighbors, and so it was not with deep sorrow that we watched our former street mates pack up their moving van and cart their belongings away, taking their menagerie of chickens, cats and yippy-yappy dogs with them. It was not that they were the stereotypical neighbors from hell, but clearly they embraced a lifestyle that was ill-suited to our small suburban cul de sac, and the nonstop intrusions from roaming and noisy animals for the past two and a half years greatly diminished our ability to enjoy our yard.

And when you are subjected to a 24/7 chorus of barking dogs, combined with other local nuisances such as trains, illegal fireworks, sideshows, sirens and general traffic noise, you forget what it is like to hear crickets, the twittering of birds in your trees or the babbling of water in your favorite fountain. Or the simple pleasure of silence. And for a day or two, we had that.

We’d hoped that blissful transition would last a bit longer. There is almost always a break between the time the old owners leave and the new ones arrive when you can catch your breath and assess the situation with your own property — projects you might want to tackle that, for whatever reason, you couldn’t do while there were people next door, lest you disturb them or vice versa. We’ve got a pretty huge list of deferred maintenance items we need to take care of, not the least of which is removing dead trees and fixing broken fences.

But their vacant driveway had barely had a chance to warm in the summer sun than unfamiliar cars began showing up and people with saws and hammers got to work on remodeling.

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G

LENN DIDN'T SET out to meet the new neighbors immediately. In fact, it was a meeting born of necessity as he went out front to start cleaning up the parkway and discovered our green waste bin was nowhere to be found. Odd, since we had put it out by the curb the night before for the garbage haulers to collect, where it sat beside the bins of the house next door — their final dump run on the eve of moving day. It didn’t take a genius to conclude that the contractors working on the property next door had probably collected our yard waste bin figuring it belonged there.

So Glenn walked next door and rang the bell, inquiring of the Latino man who answered if he had seen our green waste bin. It turned out the man was not a contractor at all, but rather the new owner, Jose. The trash company of course had collected all the bins from the former owners, so the new family had yet to contact the company to have their own bins delivered. Glenn retrieved our bin, and a pleasant if brief conversation ensued during which Jose said he planned a few days of work on the house to get it ready for his family and Glenn welcomed him to the neighborhood.

Green waste bin back in our possession, Glenn returned to his task of sweeping up sand and weeds and pruning bushes until he was greeted a short while later by a woman who arrived at the house with four kids ranging in age from preschool to high school. With translation help from her eldest daughter, Esmeralda, she introduced herself as Dolce (“sweet, like sugar”), and the rest of the children — second child Jordan, grade schooler Zoe, and her youngest Benjamin (an easy one for us to remember for obvious reasons.)

From Dolce we learned that this is the family’s first home, having purchased it after saving for seven years to make the down payment. They had been living a couple of blocks away in a rental, and had thought they would be moving here a few weeks earlier but for delays in the process. She said how excited they all were to be moving here and how she wanted to be good neighbors — anything we might need, don’t hesitate to ask, etcetera. And then Esmeralda asked something unexpected: “Do you like loud?”

Loud? As in elephants dancing on the ceiling loud? Can we elaborate? She said they like to live out loud, enjoy music while working around the house, kids running and playing (a bit of which we had already seen.) “We thought that someone used to living with trains would be used to loud sounds,” she said. Ohhhhhhhh, did we now? “Well then,” Glenn replied lamely, “I guess we’ll all learn how to be neighbors.”

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S

O FAR, THE only loudness we’ve experienced coming from next door has been the daily drone of power saws. Jose’s week-to-ten-days of renovations has extended to two weeks as the month nears its end and the family still has not officially moved in. So we have yet to find out what Esmeralda’s foreboding question truly entails, although Ben (our Ben) has already dubbed the place “The Loud House.” Hooray.

What it isn’t anymore is “The Barnyard,” which was how we knew it the past 31 months, not that we were counting. We’d thought that once the former neighbors claimed their roaming cats from our yard that we’d closed that chapter of the book and could move on, but such wasn’t the case.

The day after the moving truck departed and while Jose was just starting his demolition work on the new house, we got a knock at our door as night was setting in. We answered to find a man and woman on our porch wearing COVID masks, asking if we had seen their missing cat. You mean the cat we just retrieved a day ago from our backyard? Yes, that would be the one.

The couple turned out to be Woody and Cheryl, parents of the woman who had just moved away with her family. The cat in question was a big old Tom we had dubbed “Barney” but whose real name we discovered was White Lightning. By any name, the cat had been in the neighbor’s possession a day earlier until seeing the large metal cage they planned to place him into, at which point he clawed his way to freedom and went into hiding. No time to hunt the beast down before leaving for their new home, they turned the task over to Woody and Cheryl — and, by extension, us.

Rescuing cats that aren’t ours is not something we signed up to do. But considering that our own cats were never fond of Barney/Lightning’s presence in the yard and he’d long been a deterrent to birds visiting us, we were eager to see him caught and repatriated to his actual owners. We told Woody he could place his trap wherever he liked if he thought it would do some good. So Woody set it behind our garbage cans near the front gate with a bowl of water and food, figuring that’s where the cat often traveled. He gave us his phone number and we said we’d call him if the cat turned up.

Two days later, there hadn’t been any activity in the trap. But there had been a Barney/Lightning sighting. Glenn was watering the backyard plants when he noticed the cat lounging in a corner near the fence. We called Woody, who drove over with Cheryl and tried to coax the cat out. The cat had other ideas, and sneaked its way between all of us and fled to the opposite side of our yard, where it hopped a fence into a neighboring property. Woody decided that perhaps the trap was in the wrong place, so he relocated it from the garbage cans to the top of our garden staircase and we decided to try again.

The predictable result of this was that the next morning we went outside to find the trap occupied — not by Barney, but rather by a very frightened opossum. We took pity on the creature and once we’d freed it, we decided to set up the trap ourselves. Figuring cats aren’t as stupid as we take them for and wouldn’t knowingly walk into a metal cage, we placed the trap at the corner of our back patio beneath some bushes where we’d seen Barney before, then cleverly concealed it with branches pruned from one of our pine trees.

The following morning found our cat Phoenix going crazy near the patio door. He’d heard the plaintive meows coming from the cage even before we went to investigate, and sure enough the most wanted feline in the neighborhood had been captured. Roni called Woody to report the good news, and shortly he drove around to retrieve the cat and the cage. This time, when he and Cheryl drove away with the notorious rogue cat in their pickup truck, we knew for certain that the era of “The Barnyard” had finally come to an end.

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S

OMETHING ABOUT SEEING your neighbors work on their homes inspires you to work on your own home, and so it was with renewed determination that we went about weeding and pruning in the front yard. We took advantage of a quiet Sunday — a break in the remodeling project next door — to cut back the oleander near the parkway curb and thin out the low branches of the pine tree growing beside it. Our previous neighbors had once complained that the young tree made it difficult to mow their lawn, so Roni had performed a hasty limbectomy that was made worse when the neighbor came in afterward and trimmed it some more.

We didn’t want to have a repeat of that with our new neighbors, so we gave the tree a more extensive manicure with eyes to shaping it and getting it off the ground. This would have the added benefit of letting more sunlight get to the oleander and leave more room for Ben to have access to the passenger door of his car, which was impossible given his parking spot on our driveway.

Glenn used a reciprocating saw to lop off the largest tree branches, while Roni tackled the oleander and offered guidance as to what to keep or remove. Our driveway quickly piled up with branches, which we chopped down to manageable lengths so they could fit in the back of our pickup truck. We’d been planning a dump run anyway, so this was just a good opportunity to top off the load from the garage that was already in there. We swept up the aftermath and marveled at how much better the tree and oleander looked after just a little bit of cutting and sweeping.

Now we were emboldened to do more. But it’s funny how the Home Project Fairy derails you with unwanted curves just when you need them least, and such was the case with Glenn’s newfound determination to tackle the yard. The disruption occurred in the form of a problem that developed in our washing machine that very afternoon — the dreaded “LE” error code. We say dreaded because an LE error is one of those cryptic codes that can indicate any number of problems in a front-loading washer, and because diagnosing and fixing it would be time consuming, expensive or both.

The worst problem by far, however, is that our LG washer and dryer are stacked and not easily accessible in our tiny laundry room, and any repairs would mean having to slide the combo away from the wall. This wasn’t easy when we had to do it in the past, but that was before we installed our vinyl plank floor last fall, which we left unfinished in the laundry room so as to avoid moving the machines. We hoped it would be longer than eight months before the time came to confront the floor situation again. Now we had an awkward lip on the floor that we had to get the washer’s feet over. How to accomplish that without killing our new floor or ourselves would be a challenge.

From watching several YouTube videos on the topic, we determined the most likely culprit of our washer’s LE error code was a defective “hall sensor” — an inexpensive plastic part that controls the motor and spin cycles. We bought the part for about $15 on Amazon. All we had to do was install it, which meant opening up the back of the machine. Glenn doesn’t enjoy moving heavy objects these days, so it took a few attempts before we managed to wriggle the stacked machines out to the center of the laundry room — just enough space so he could squeeze in behind them and do the disassembly work.

With the washer/dryer moved, we decided this was the appropriate time to finish the floor. So once the new part arrived from Amazon, Glenn quickly installed it and then spent an afternoon cutting and placing the remaining floor planks. About a week had elapsed from start of the repair to finish, and it felt all worthwhile when we fired up the washing machine’s test cycle and it spun effortlessly. We figured we’d saved a few hundred dollars of a repair bill, so we splurged with a nice take-out meal for dinner.

Ben was the first guinea pig to test the repair. He’d been waiting a week to do laundry, so we let him run a small load through just to see how things went. While the load ran from start to finish without throwing an error code, we noted that it was anything but smooth in the spin cycle. In fact, the basket rocked about so violently that we feared it would break again at any minute. How long had it been behaving like that? So while for now we have a washer that runs and cleans clothes, we are considering more repairs to its suspension system that will require further disassembly and perhaps more cumbersome labor than we encountered on this project. Just another distraction as we attempt to tackle the real home improvement projects that await. 

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E

VERY YEAR SINCE 1988, without fail except for once in the 1990s, we have attended the Delta Pear Fair in Courtland. We were looking forward to what would have been our 32nd visit to the festival on July 26 — the last Sunday of the month, as has always been the case. But that was before COVID-19 arrived on our shores and wrought havoc on everything from dining to pro sports to community celebrations. And so it was in late April that we learned via a Facebook post the sad news that our beloved summertime event had been canceled for this year.

A summer without the Pear Fair seemed unfathomable when all of this shelter-in-place business started back in March and we naively thought the world would return to normal in a few weeks. But as spring and then summer events began canceling plans, we knew it was likely Courtland’s event would too. So we accepted the unpleasant decision and took comfort only in knowing that the Pear Fair and its disappointed fans were not alone.

But a decades-long habit is hard to break, and so is our curiosity. While we knew there would be no pear pie or pear bread or icy pear coolers waiting for us once we arrived, we nevertheless decided to take a drive up the Delta to see things for ourselves. We were thinking — hoping, really — that the townsfolk would still show their spirit and host their own gatherings in their front yards, just as they always do on Pear Fair Sunday. Maybe there would be something to acknowledge an event that has been such an integral part of the community since 1972.

But the park around Mokelumne High School was as dead as dead could be. No small gatherings, no signs or decorations, no yard sales. Not a hint that anything was out of the ordinary as we stared at the vacant lawn where there should have been craft and food booths and a shade tent filled with people listening to live music. Ah well, at least we could say we were there even if the show wasn’t.

Because it has been months since we have gone anywhere other than to the grocery store in our own town, we decided to cruise down Highway 160 with stops in Walnut Grove, Isleton and Rio Vista. We were happy to find the Walnut Grove Iron Works open, as it is the place where we have been going for years to buy metal garden art for our yard. The owner recognized us, even through our face masks. We bought a new ornament to add to our collection and continued along the River Road.

Just east of Rio Vista is the Delta Farmers Market, and because we had been deprived of our pear goodies this year we hoped they might have a few fresh pears for sale. We weren’t disappointed. In addition to our token couple of Bartlett pears we bought, Roni added some ears of corn, strawberries and fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. Then we took the long way home by driving on Delta Loop, past all the marinas and camping resorts, and noted all the people there not practicing social distancing. And we wonder why our country can’t get coronavirus under control.

Although it was nice to get out of the house for a bit, truly enjoying a Sunday drive during the pandemic is difficult. People are frightened of each other. The vagaries of face mask protocol are unclear and policies are enforced differently from town to town. We all want to live our lives as “normal,” but this is the new normal until there is a cure for COVID-19. And that doesn’t appear likely soon.

 

Glenn, Roni and Ben