We’ve all had these folks living beside us at one time or another in our lives, right? You know the ones – they’re nice enough people, but you just have to shake your head and wonder “What in the hell are they thinking?”
It started out with the house in “oh-so-posh” Bethesda where they would bring lamps out onto the front lawn to drink beer and play croquet after dark.
And then there was the house on 9th street that built a sprawling, multi-tiered deck which covered the entire back yard and caused people going up to the back door to have to duck under the high-tension power line. Gezellig!
There was also the place on Winsome Road where they got the wild-hair idea to grow wine grapes on a prominent hillside behind the house and they spent weeks putting in terraces and fences and watering systems only to have the vines quickly wither and die on the north facing slope. Duh!
In Sterling, Virginia it was the crazy guy who hated the traffic which short-cut through his neighborhood to save a minute on their way to the local Kohl’s strip plaza, so he would pull branches out of the woods and throw them into the street to slow the cars down. Funny how it was ALWAYS so windy in that neighborhood.
And Oakland, Maryland? Well, let’s just say that many people in that fine, upstanding, ultra-conservative community are feeling very lucky that those whacky city-folk that moved in on Herrington Manor Road built their house out in the middle of nowhere where the locals didn’t have to deal with them. It just might have shaken the community’s moral foundations to the core if they’d have known what was REALLY going on back that mile-long gravel driveway. Thank god for gates with locks on them!
And now it’s happened again here in Haarlem and it is time to finally admit that WE are in fact the blight on any neighborhood that we move into. It’s a long, complicated legacy of which I am very proud. But It has special meaning here in The Netherlands, because even though the Dutch have a famous tolerance for the eccentric within their society, they also have a strict code of conformity for those people within their inner-circles. It’s a sociological petri dish better left discussed in a different blog entry.
In any case, much to the early dismay of our neighbors, we’ve entered the realm of plastic lawn ornaments. At least it wasn’t garden gnomes or pink flamingos. No, no, no. I just hauled a plastic owl back from America and put it up in the back garden on a 15 foot wooden pole to keep the freakin’ seagulls from setting up a nest on the roof. Once these flying vermin have a nest, it’s a daily 4:00 AM “screech fest” which can pierce even the heaviest earplugs. And since seagulls are protected here in Holland (and guns don’t fit into the “tolerance” model), I didn’t think that the authorities would appreciate it if brought my 12-gauge shotgun along to “scare” the gulls away…hence the plastic owl.
At first, the neighbors didn’t know what to think of our new lawn ornament. It was pretty in-your-face in the back yard and we got hesitant, sideways greetings for the first day or two. Then Hans, a bit eccentric himself (singing-Adel-at-the-top-of-his-lungs-in-the-garden sort of stuff), got up the nerve to ask me about it. He laughed, said it was “worth a try” and put up their own plastic owl on the roof of their shed.
Once Hans was on-board, the other neighbors sighed in relief that conformity was protected in the neighborhood and started treating us “normally” again. And the best part? No seagulls nested in our immediate area this year and we’ve all been able to sleep in the mornings.
Eccentricity? You’re welcome!
