Seanna (n. shaw-nuh): Life with the Neighbors, Part 2

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To read the first part of the story, go here: Life with the Neighbors, Part 1.

It was late spring of 1988. I was 21 years old; my fabulous husband was 23. We were about to move into our first home, a brand new home they were building just for us. We couldn't believe it. Our visits to the construction site got more and more frequent, and we began to prepare for the physical move. We did have an apartment's worth of stuff, but certainly not enough for a 3 bedroom home. But that was OK. We spent many months searching for a sectional to put in the living room. I am normally a pretty decisive person--it took me less time to decide on the house--but for some reason it has always taken me a very long time to pick out couches/sectionals. Then when I do, each apparently looks like the one that came before it. But even knowing that, knowing that I will probably eventually go with a plain sofa in the gray range with nothing crazy going on with the cushions, it still takes me forever. Guess what I'm sitting on now? Yup, a plain sofa in the gray range with nothing crazy going on with the cushions. One day I am going to lose my mind and get something in the tan range with nothing crazy going on with the cushions. That day will probably be after 14 months of searching. I have to say, though, that sectional we bought brand new in 1988 was still with us until 2005, when it met its sad end at the edge of our driveway, all forlorn in its separate, abandoned pieces. Sure, it may have been totally and completely pockmarked and kid-pawed. Sure, a piece of metal might have protruded from it and nicked up one of the children pretty good, good enough to leave a scar. But that thing was a steadfast companion for a lot of years and through a lot of history.

Mostly, though, aside from the new sectional, we just had the stuff we'd acquired for our apartments in Delaware. It was very easy to plan to put a small apartment's worth of furniture into a decent-sized starter home. We may not have had furniture for the spare bedrooms, but it wasn't like we had people to put in there either. Not then. Job-wise, I remember going through a couple in pretty rapid-fire succession. There was the attorney's office in Orlando, and then there was the wonderful happenstance of when I went to work for a tiny little company in Sanford that did landscaping. That's where I met the wonderful, one-of-a-kind, fantastic, funny, meticulous and precise, smart and beautiful Carol, not to mention her beautiful baby, Jason. I also met (and worked for) Carol's husband, Scott. But then they got divorced and it turns out Jason was the best thing to be said about that, so we shall leave that story, since it is certainly not my own. Anyway, yay for happenstance!!

I have always been interested in domestic things. Well, most domestic things. I like linens and dishes and any sort of thing you can collect that is also useful. I like paint chips and upholstery samples and carpet swatches. So with this new house thing, I was having quite a good time. It was a little scary but overall very fun. And yet.

And yet, nearly every time we went to visit our future home, there were the neighbors. More properly, there were the pygmy-sized neighbors. They would dart around to the side of their house and stare at us and run away in their diapers if we so much as looked in their direction. I had no idea if they could even speak, yet there they were, frolicking in their plastic britches and usually covered in grime. For the most part, we saw little of Wanda and Darryl, and it was almost like a honeymoon period for us and the neighbors. Or maybe more accurately, the calm before the storm.

We had our final walk-through in late May, I believe, and then the day finally came, and we went to the closing on our first home. What an intense period of a person's life. I look back on it quite fondly and overall it really was a total blast. We signed what seemed like an impossible number of papers, they shook our hands, handed over the keys and said they'd call to set up the six-month walk-through or the completion of the "punch list" from the final walk-through, something like that. And we were off. The very first thing we did when we got in the car was start giggling and cackling like loons, absolutely incredulous that someone gave us a mortgage for a whole HOUSE. With keys and EVERYthing. Then we set to work moving in.

Sometime before we were all the way moved in but well after we'd started, we got our first promising welcome committee visit. I saw them headed down the road in the direction of our driveway and I knew they were coming to say hi. They all had cans of beer, and there were at least 5 of them. We were about to meet what I have always termed as "the Good Neighbors." No doubt they heartily agree with me.

I ran to get my fabulous husband, and he joined me on the driveway to greet them. There was not a question of asking them in since we were in the middle of moving. Plus I was only 21 and I'm sure the idea hadn't yet occurred to me that I could ask people into my new home. After all, I still felt like we were pulling one over on Maronda Homes and the mortgage company.

So we met the Good Neighbors in our driveway. As I recall, there were at least five. There was John and his wife Darlene, and then Gary and Steven, who were Darlene's brothers. They lived down the road. Well, John and Darlene did. Ultimately, Gary and Steven built homes on either side of their sister and they formed their own Michigan Triumvirate down there. There was always beer. And there was never a Wanda, nor a Darryl. John and Darlene had three children: two boys and a little girl. Darlene ran a tight ship, and her home was always spotless. They were good people. Good people who, 12 years later almost to the day, helped us pack our things into a rental truck as we moved out of what had become a war zone.

We settled in a little, and I started a job working at a landscape nursery in Apopka. Then I left that job and eventually I got a new job working as a temp for a psychiatrist in Orlando. Things were pretty nice for a good little while. After we'd lived there six months or so, I realized something was up and lo and behold, we discovered we were going to need one of the spare bedrooms because I was expecting a baby. Yay! We know the end of that story; you've seen her on the blog many times, right? So the home furnishing/decorating/keeping thing was giving way rapidly to the pregnancy and new baby books and paraphernalia as my interests shifted and we prepared for the arrival of Baby Beth.

She arrived in the middle of August, past her due date, and we set about trying to figure out the whole parenting thing. Fortunately for us, Beth was a very, very good baby. She was one of those mythical baby creatures who sleeps through the night the first night you have her home from the hospital (ok, the second--but really from the second night on unless she was sick). My mother used to come over to visit and could not believe it. She really thought my kid was magical. She used to just shake her head and tell me she'd never ever heard of this phenomenon. She was fascinated with our adorable bald baby daughter.

So, of course, was my fabulous husband. However, by this time he had gone back into the Navy and spent a great deal of time burning up and down Interstate 95 for his 4 hour round-trip daily commute. He did it for a good long while, through fog and steam and every other thing Florida can come up with to try to kill you dead. Drug runners, giant cockroaches (does it really fool anybody when they try to pass them off as palmetto bugs? A cockroach by any other name...), tropical storms, eventually forest fires, you name it. Anyway, as you can imagine, this was not an indefinitely sustainable situation. There was a lot of time when I was home alone, and fortunately, unbeknownst to me, Wanda got pregnant again right around that time. We were in a sort of "avoid" holding pattern, where I would leave the house early, drop the baby off to my mom in Longwood, and then come home in the late afternoon and collapse, only to do it all over again the next day. I worked more than an hour away from home myself on all but the very best of traffic days. There just was not a lot of face time with anyone in our neighborhood.

1989 turned into 1990, and I was having a great time at the psychiatrist's office. I was learning a new skill, and it turned out I had a knack for it. The psychiatrist was quite a character and he would by turns infuriate me and make me laugh until I cried. One day my fabulous husband and I took a day and set off in the car with no particular plan in mind. That's the day we found Longboat Key and Anna Maria Island, where we would subsequently return to vacation a few times, several children later. But you know what was happening in 1990, especially as 1990 heated up. Saddam Hussein was happening. We were about to be engaged in what we now call "the first Gulf War" but at the time of course we didn't know it would be the first, although we should have, and so we called it first Desert Shield and then, inevitably, Desert Storm. As a result of the United States hurtling toward a massive engagement in the Middle East, things were happening in the military. My fabulous husband was going to get orders for somewhere other than Jacksonville, Florida (well, Mayport, to be precise). For a little while, I thrilled at the notion that we might end up at Treasure Island. I mean, just the name alone, who wouldn't want to live there for at least a little while? Ultimately, though, he ended up in school in Memphis and then went on to be stationed in a little town not far from Dallas. That's not a realistic commute, Dallas to Deltona. Although I was a little disappointed about losing out on the Treasure Island thing, I realized that no matter what, one thing was certain: We were finally going to be leaving ~~the steaming pit of doom~~ Florida again!

As we made the preparations to move, we realized we were in an upside-down situation with the mortgage, and that by the time we paid all the closing costs and realtor fees, we would have to bring a serious chunk of money to the table. That's when we decided our best option was to rent it for a few years, until either we returned or the market had improved and we had paid down the mortgage enough to at least break even. We set about finding rental agencies, found one, and signed the contract for them to handle leasing arrangements for an up-front chunk and 10% of the rental fees. I said goodbye to my fun job at the psychiatrist's, my mom finally got her house sold, and she decided to come with us. We packed up the house, and we said goodbye to the Good Neighbors. At this point, I had discovered that Wanda had indeed not only been pregnant, but had had a baby girl. Beth was just a little over a year old at this point. We were by no means friends, Wanda and I, but we had developed a sort of cordial pseudo-relationship.

The movers had come, packed up and moved the house, and there were just a very few belongings still in the house that I needed to take with us to Tennessee, where Beth and I would be living with my fabulous husband's parents (Hi, Bill! Hi, Peggy!). My father-in-law had already traveled down to Florida to assist with the upcoming move, and he and Beth had made fast friends at a restaurant over his plate of green beans, which she stole one by one with her chubby little toddler fingers, all the while looking him directly in the eye.

I had Beth's crib and bedding still in the house, an alarm clock, and a few other items, things I wanted to have with me for the short-term move to Knoxville as we waited for Beth's daddy to finish school in Memphis. My plan was to come back the next day and pick up the last few things. For some reason, I made the decision to leave the house key with Wanda, telling her that the rental company would be by the next morning to pick it up so they could set about getting the house leased. She agreed to hold it until the next morning for me.

The next day I showed up at the house late in the afternoon. We were staying at my mom's house at this point, I believe, as waited for her closing in a few days or a week or so. I used my key and let myself in and went to the nursery to take the crib apart and pack it up.

As I walked in, I had just the strangest feeling. I can't quite put it into words, but it was sort of as if the house was not happy. Sort of like an anxiety or charged feeling hanging in the air. I think I even said "Hello??" as I walked toward the nursery. As soon as I got to the doorway and looked in, I knew something was wrong...

And I think that's where we will leave things until next time. I will try to get Part 3 up before the weekend is out. Next up: Wanda has overstepped her bounds, and the police are called for the very first time in the Neighbor Wars.