Continued from here
Once upon a time, my house was nestled against beautiful woods.
Then one fine spring day, I heard chainsaws and backhoes. Soon after, my house filled with smoke from a burn pile. This would persist for over six weeks. Thinner and thinner did the trees grow, until one day I literally saw a bulldozer reaching over my lawn. Thus began the Epoch of Ugliness.
Soon, Lou Ann McNugget was yelling to me. "Doesn't it look better?!" shrieked the neighbor with whom I wanted zero relationship.
"No."
"SO much better," she nodded.
At an impromptu meeting of neighbors in my driveway, the guy two doors down asked Lou Ann what we all wondered. "Why?! Why do you think this looks better?"
"I love mowing the lawn," she replied. And that she does. She rides that mower every single day during the summer.
Soon, she put lawn ornaments right by my property. My favorite was a frog. Its ass mooned me every time I left my house.
Not coincidentally, I had the property line surveyed and erected a fence. I didn't consult with the neighbors who, after all, announced their plans with a bulldozer. Yet she complained. Along the way, she mentioned that of course, they had had the line surveyed, too. Considering that they do everything on the cheap and with a preposterous sense of entitlement, not to mention the lack of survey markers, clearing permits, or records of any kind, I knew she was lying.
I called the county. They knew my neighbors quite well. In investigating their illegal clearcutting, the county had noted three things:
- Lou Ann told them that all the trees were "danger trees," even the 2 footers 100 feet from their house.
- When the county asked about the unpermitted deck construction, Lou Ann told them that they merely replaced the existing deck.
- Historical photographs showed that the deck was entirely new.
Soon after, they hired a crew to do some more clearing. "Weed Control is making me do it," Lou Ann told me with great resignation, clearly not realizing that I was verifying every one of her lies at this point.
"We told who to do what now?" the Weed Control office said.
"I hate them," the McNuggets' undocumented worker whispered to me. He pointed to the survey marker eight feet from my driveway. "She told me to clear to your driveway. When I discovered this marker, she told me that you'd moved it."
Tomorrow: Lou Ann wants a favor