Fast Fiction

First, let’s start with I have feelings of bitchiness, I have taken no bitchy action, made no bitchy comments.

I live on a quaint street and have nice neighbors. They’re damn neighborly. Of late, the neighbors seems to be breeding and many have toddlers. (They also have dogs and cats, but that’s for another post, I guess.)

Folks like to walk their kids around the street (it’s a circle) and the kids will walk or be carried or sometimes ride little bikes of scooters. One family likes to come to the front of our house and either play in our yard (which is all pebbles) or ride their little scooters up and down our front walk.

Our house is like this: we’re pretty close to the street, about ten feet from the sidewalk. The whole front of our house is low windows. We keep our blinds open, anyone can look in and see us watching TV or chatting in the living room. It’s obvious when we’re home, we’re sitting right there. The house has a little walk down to the front door, and a walk that goes the length of the house (under the windows).

One of our little neighbors likes to ride up our front walk on his razor scooter and back and forth in front of our windows. If the windows weren’t there, he’d be five feet away from me. (Okay, he’s maybe three years old, I don’t hold him personally responsible for this behavior.)

This irritates me. It irritates the dog too, and that probably is part of my problem. But I don’t think that my front yard is everyone else’s playground. It’s not like the kid came by and did it once. The kid has come by on three occasions that I’ve noticed (because the dog will tell me if I’m not in the room) and with two different parents. I understand folk’s dog wandering into my yard. I removed the lawn because I understood that too well and replaced it with lovely pea gravel (which just thrills the kiddies, it seems - and the dogs seem to be fine with it as well, I’m not sure the kids know they’re playing with urine glazed pebbles).

I’ve not said anything to anyone other than The Man (who thinks, likely rightly that I should get over it). But I wonder how this family would feel if I took a book and went and sat on their front stoop and read for a while. I’m not sure they’d get my point, and I’m sure I wouldn’t feel any better for it.

I don’t want to put up a fence. The fence in the back yard is fine, we all have dogs and it keeps the peace. But I don’t want to be walled in.

Maybe those motion sensor sprinklers would do the trick? Please advise, gentle readers.