the neighbors...

i love our neighborhood. i love our neighbors. daily, we play outside together, monthly we have dinner parties together, we watch after each others children, etc. our neighborhood is culturally diverse. our diversity made a great "around the world" dinner thing we did last summer. each month we honored a different family and their ethnicity by eating their cultural food. we started with the "american"/"all white" family. they had "ears and beers" (the ears were corn on the cob). at that party, we planned what weekend worked best with everyone for the rest of the parties... one neighbor is a policeman and his schedule is constantly changing. over the course of five months, we had "middle eastern" night with our single guy neighbor. we had "filipino night" at our house (because of my husbands heritage). we had "mexican night" at the house where the hubby is from new mexico. we had "soul food night" at the the black people (african american) house across the street. we ALL get along GREAT! i say all of this to preface my story today. last may, one of our families that we were great friends with (who hosted many game night parties) moved to southaven, ms. they sold their house to a couple that was about to get married. color shouldn't matter, but for the sake of stating it, they were black. i have no problem obviously with color because our neighborhood is so diverse. we also have a chinese family that plays outside with us a lot (and ping pong in our garage a lot). they were not included in our around the world cooking though because it is rumor that they eat the pets in their garage (birds, rabbits, etc)... needless to say we were afraid of them to cook! back to the story. folks moved out in may, new folks moved in and got married in sept. it was obvious when they moved in that they didn't associate much with "white people." how could we tell? they rarely spoke when we said hello, they didn't attend the "welcome to our neighborhood" party that we had FOR THEM, etc. the female is a cop and last summer, whenever we smelled WEED and announced it out loud, they would close their garage because they knew they had been caught. we never actually confronted them, we just knew it. anyways, since the weather has gotten nicer, and we have been playing outside a lot more, we have noticed lots of different cars in and out of that house. we have noticed a young guy walking a pit bull, we have noticed that we don't recognize the people coming and going or parking in the garage. last week, they left the garage door open all day (by mistake). when the guy got home, a neighbor and i walked over to inform him. he acted as if it was his home, so i asked where the other two people (the owners) were. he said they moved out TWO MONTHS ago. ok. wait a minute. i live next door to these people. one of the other girl neighbors and myself are the nosey neighbors that know everything going on in our little section of the street. how in tarnations do you miss people moving out next door?!? so, i prod. "oh really! we never saw a for sale sign in the yard or anything." new guy (who looks 17) says in his best african language that i had to concentrate hard to understand, " we kinda just took over where they left off." how do you do that is what was going through my mind. he let us know that he and his girlfriend (the girls pregnant sister) and their other little girl were living there. i replied, "oh, so are they still married?" he was quiet and didn't say much. we later found out that original guy that lived there had d.v. (domestic violence) charges against him. wheels are still turning about what happened to original owners. we knew they had a hard time getting financed to begin with, they didn't live there long, and they surely couldn't get approved for another house or even an apt. could they? so where are they now? and who the heck are these new people with the pit bull (that is half of the time not on a leash and he pooped smack dab in the middle of my front yard two days ago)??? when my husband spoke to him (you know the "hey, how you doing?" kind of talk), he got in the car and looked at me and said. "ok, the old people were ghetto, but these people are ghetto ghetto!" don't believe me, here is a picture of new guys ride...

i guess it is time for us to start thinking about moving before people think we live in

hickory hill.