So long, Marion
My neighbor was an equal opportunity offender
I was unloading my groceries this morning when a neighbor stopped by.
“Aren’t you glad the witch is gone?”
We barely knew each other, in fact, I finally asked her name today after 15 years living here, though I knew she was friendly. She was a dog lover.
“Finally!” I nodded turning my head towards the For Sale sign two doors down. The owner’s name was Marion and witch didn’t even come close to describing her. She was elderly, maybe in her 80s, but pretty spry until the Lord reached down and bopped her on the head causing some injury bad enough that she required a cane, then a walker.
Last time I saw Marion she stared me down in the driveway, and barked something at me about parking on the street something she regularly did even though she had a perfectly suitable driveway for her ugly square KIA.
As my mother might say, she was a “parking on the street is good enough for me, but not for thee”, type of person.
I told her to fuck off, maybe even gave her the finger. I can’t say I regret that conversation, as it pretty much summed up how all of our encounters ended. She was mean, she was spiteful, she was racist against my Jamaican neighbors, and hateful against my gay neighbors across the street.
Our feud began at least 10 years ago when she applied adhesive to my then daughter-in-law’s car because she parked in a legal parking spot in front of our house. Our relationship continued to spiral after she menaced me at my fence at 7 a.m. because my son’s garbage fell over accidentally. Then she accused me of dog abuse because I fed Viggo outside to stop fights over food with Sophie.
The final straw came after a derecho hit our tree destroying the fence and nearly flattening my Subaru (luckily the fence saved it). Marion remarked to another neighbor that she wished the tree had fallen on my house and we would have to move.
She must have been projecting.
There was no way to repair the relationship.
She had no charity in her heart, and no love for her community. Instead, she wielded the power of the Smartphone to anonymously bully everyone around her. She was so terrible to my Jamaican neighbors that she constantly called the cops on them, and in fact called a sympathetic black cop the N word. The N word.
In her last act of love, she called the bylaw on my wonderful neighbors across the way after their lawnmower busted.
I guess even the Good Lord had had enough of the old bag, and smote her once again.
Or as David Steinberg once described Lot’s last words when God turned his wife into a pillar of salt, “Dear, God told me to tell you to look back”.
Last I heard she was off to some old age home where she will live out the rest of her horrible existence complaining about the food, threatening to call the authorities on residents, and demanding to return to the home that her son spent weeks emptying.
There was no love lost between the son and the mother, apparently. Or with Marion’s brother who got so mad at her that he tore up her rose garden.
Marion was an equal opportunity offender.
I have the heart of an angel and I love and respect most people, but not her.
As Samantha, the gentle woman across the road told me, “I hope she gets to live in the house she deserves.”
Amen, sister.
The neighbors can finally sigh a sigh of relief knowing she is in a better place. Instead of nosing around in our business.
So long, Marion, it’s time that we began to laugh, and sing, and think about you never again.
(I need to wash her out of my brain, so here’s a little LC, which I will be blasting in the backyard with no worries that bylaw will ever come calling again.)