FWN

Townhome communities tend to be more transient than neighborhoods with houses because there are a lot of rentals and people usually move on to buy something bigger. Laura struggled with that over the years as friends from church moved into our neighborhood then out to buy homes that we couldn’t afford. Neither did I really want to. I still liked a small, manageable place.

Due to their transient nature and close proximity, townhome communities tend to lend themselves to plenty of what I’ll call FWN - Fun With Neighbors. I’ve found that in detached houses, neighbors can tend to stay aloof. But with a townhome, when you can hear what’s going on next door, it’s harder to stay isolated. Our townhome was one of the middle units in a line of four.

Over the nine years we were there, we had a variety of neighbors – the homeschool family with five kids in the two-bedroom unit next door, the single dad with his son, the partiers with their thumping music and drunken yelling ‘til all hours of the night (for which I made many calls to the police). We heard the tragic screaming of the physically abused young lady next door and the thumping as her boyfriend dragged her down the stairs by her hair (we also called the police).

Although we had some fear of what he might do to us if we got involved, we determined to see if we could. We advised her to leave and let her know that we would do whatever she wanted us to do to help her. Sometimes she did come to us and he would actually respond to our intervention, even coming with me to some church functions. But then we would watch the heart-breaking pattern as it would escalate all over again. Then it got more complicated when a child came along. Eventually she finally did leave and he moved out too. 

A new family from church moved into the unit two doors down. We called this man the tornado. He was so high energy, it felt like a tornado had blown through when he came and went. 

They had adopted two boys from Lithuania and he had some unique methods of keeping the boys under control. When the parents needed a break, they would put their car seats in front of the TV, buckle them in and occupy them with food and a show. It kept them content and the parents didn’t have to keep such a close eye on them.

Squirrels are ubiquitous in Virginia. There was a tree down their end of the building from which squirrels would jump and make their way into our attics. For the “tornado”, it was time for war. One day I saw him across the street skulking around a tree. I called out, 

“What are you doing.”

”Shhhhhhhh.” 

I went across and found that he was spreading poison for the squirrels around the base of the tree.

He also set live traps in his attic. He would catch the squirrels, take them down to the lake in the cage, tie a rope to the cage and throw them into the lake until they drowned. He told me about one squirrel who just would not die. He kept throwing it in for increasing periods of time and each time it still came up alive. Eventually its tenacity so won his respect that he let it go.

We had another neighbor in the end unit of the next building who had an old car that was very loud. One day, to our great happiness, her car died. During that time, our church hosted what we called a Family Festival each year at our local park. It was a totally free event with food and games and entertainment that we used to reach out to the community.

We had flyers we handed out to the surrounding neighborhoods. Our family went door to door inviting people. We included the neighbor whose car had just died and we discovered that she was a single mom. That was when I got the crazy prompting that we were supposed to give her our car.

I tried to ignore, suppress and push away the prompting but it just kept coming back. I finally told Laura. She wasn’t thrilled but after getting used to the idea, she was willing if that’s what we were supposed to do. It wasn’t going to be easy. Getting to work was going to get complicated. I would have to go back to getting rides or she would have to load up all the kids and drive me again.

We gave her the car and, sure enough, it wasn’t easy. But it would have been much harder to live with that constant nagging in my head, knowing that I wasn’t doing something that I was supposed to. The car’s air conditioning wasn’t working but neither was it working in her car that had died. She seemed grateful and came to the Family Festival with her daughter but that is about as far as our connection went.

Some time later, after she had moved out, we got a call from an insurance fraud guy asking about the car. He told us that the woman had made an insurance claim because the car had caught on fire but they suspected that she had started it. Oh well, we did what we knew we were supposed to do.