strange neighbor fellows

Despite the fact that my brain is finally firming back up from the mush that the recent week on the road reduced it to, I have decided to continue to bore you all with the mundane details of my everyday life. Today, we're talking about neighbors.

We met several of our next door neighbors on the day that we unpacked the moving trailer. We were trudging up the stairs, boxes in tow, and when we reached our landing the door next to ours opened and a horde of children ran screaming out of their apartment followed by billows of toxic white smoke and a panicked woman in a worn housedress. The four small children huddled on the tiny third floor patio with their hands clamped over their ears against the wailing fire alarm, crying and yelling for their mother who was still inside the apartment dealing with the cause of the smoke. She soon emerged to borrow my burly manfriend, whose lab safety training must have done him some good as he soon found the source of the problem--a plastic toy that had been placed in the oven and had burst into flames--and saved the day. The mother babbled her gratitude in Spanglish, the children stopped screaming, the grandmother returned (I'm still not sure if she ran for help or just ran), and we continued on with our move. That evening we decided that renter's insurance might not be such a bad investment after all. I also checked the height of the drop from our balcony, just in case the hallway is ever on fire and we have to jump ship. It's a pretty steep drop, but I figure if I avoid landing on the cement porch below and roll once I hit the grass (without hitting the treeline), I could probably survive. In any case, it probably beats burning to death.

Several nights later we came home after dark, allowing us to peek inside the lit apartments from the parking lot. One of our downstairs neighbor's shades were open and she had all of her lights on, so we could clearly see into her living room. Thus, we discovered this:

In case you can't tell from the mediocre photograph, that is in fact a fully-trimmed Christmas tree. Now, I must admit that the previous week I had watched Love Actually, a film set in the Christmas season, but in my defense I believe that there is a very clear line between the pleasure of watching a snowy holiday film in the middle of August, and the insanity of actually keeping a decorated tree up year-round. Oh, I'm not being fair. She's probably a very nice yet eccentric person who, for one reason or another, chooses to celebrate Christmas in August instead of December with everyone else. Maybe it makes the shopping easier, I don't know. If I ever gather the courage to talk to her, I'll make sure to ask when Halloween is--it would be a tragedy to miss out on any trick-or-treating just because she's completely bonkers.

Finally, last weekend we moved my brother's ginormous couch into our apartment. Rather, with the amount of sweat, grunting, cursing and weak cheering upon success, it felt like we birthed the couch more than moved it. Whatever, the point is that we met our other next door neighbors--two gentlemen that generously assisted us during the delivery. We were extremely thrilled to not only have friendly neighbors (the Spanish-speaking family with the kids next door is nice enough, just a little loud and difficult to communicate with) but to have neighbors who shared a common interest--archery. J had just started researching archery ranges to pick the sport back up again, and the bow cases that they were carrying up the stairs caught his eye. You know what caught my eye? The mounted animal heads that covered every inch of their living room walls. One of the men leaned out of his front door to shake my hand, pulling the door closed as much as possible. I thought he was just being private, or that they might be gay and just wary of public scrutiny. And then I saw the giant deer head hovering over the armchair. When he opened the door to retreat into his apartment I caught the full view: deer, bears, bobcats, ducks, elk--nearly any damn thing you can shoot was mounted on their wall. It look so crowded that I wondered if they felt self-conscious sitting in the room, staring down the blank marble eyes of those they had slain. Now I really hope that they are gay. Not just because that would be awesome (how many kill-hungry redneck gay couples can there be in the world, anyway?), but because I find the prospect of a stable relationship more reassuring than the possibility that they're just two guys who like killing things so much that they live together in their den of death. J said they might have stuffed humans in the back rooms. Oh God. I really really hope that this whole hunting thing is just an attempt to butch up. Maybe if we feed them cookies they won't hurt us. That's a law of the jungle, right? Don't shoot the hand that feeds you cookies?

We have yet to meet many of our neighbors, but after these recent revelations, I think I'll take it slow. Those two little Vietnamese boys who live downstairs sure seemed sweet, but you just never know. Their eighty-year-old grandmother seemed a little sketchy...