The Dreaded Call

After spending every week in Chicago the last three months, I finally got the dreaded call yesterday at work. Not the call about a death or illness or fire or anything like that. It's the call you get when you just know you needed to be home and you weren't.

For me it had to do with the neighbors behind us in CH. The ones that have decided that the strip along our property line (the back of our yard, the side of theirs) is their most prized possession and they've apparently spent the whole time I've been gone weeding, tilling, planting etc an area that had heretofore been given over to undergrowth, poison ivy and wisteria.

That doesn't sound like a bad thing at all! But yesterday J noticed that they were reaching under and through the split rail fence that I put up inside the property line and cutting and spraying stuff on our property. Now I was always taught that you didn't put a fence right on the property line, particularly since at the time I put it up the house behind us hadn't even been built yet. So I put it in about 8-12 inches inside the line. This has never been a problem with the last two occupants of the house behind us, but Lady J went out to have a little talk with them yesterday about property lines and property rights.

Did I mention that the elderly Asian gentleman has very little English? So J was out there trying to make him understand that the line was NOT at the fence and THEN tried to convince him that the 9' tall cedar that I've raised from a cedarpup that he was about to cut down was by God on OUR side of the line.

This apparently didn't go too far but she finally at least convinced him that either she was dangerous enough that he'd get his son to talk to her. I'm pretty sure his son has little more English than his pop does, so this should be interesting.

Now I'm the farthest thing from being a male chauvinist that you're going to find, but this is the kind of thing that the guy is supposed to handle. J's call to me made it quite clear that she shares that opinion. And I'm here, not there, and this isn't the kind of thing that a phonecall (given the language issue) is going to resolve.

So she's got the drapes in the back of the house closed and is refusing to look out the back because she doesn't want to know if the tree is gone or not. If the tree is gone, I'm going to be furious, but no more than I am now not being there to protect my shit.

This sucks.