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Our new neighbors moved into the vacant O’Donnell house last week and are still receiving things in trucks, almost daily. Usually people tend to move in one large truck, something big enough to hold it all, and deliver it in one fell swoop. But this young family apparently is relying on friends and relatives who have pick-ups.
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It makes for a general nuisance on the street during prime hours of traffic. Or so says my husband.
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Each morning, before work, my husband looks out the window to the O’Donnell house across the street, sips some coffee, and says “happy young families don’t know what they’re in for”.
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He puts his coffee down and picks up the paper. I make toast.
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The new family has a baby and a young boy, probably 4 or 5 years old. The boy, I find, is usually found running around the front yard of the O’Donnell house, hiding from nothing behind bushes, lying facedown in the grass, over watering the plants with a hose. It is only Spring, so I assume that the boy isn’t yet school age, or he would be in school.
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And yet, I’m surprised at that since his mother is never around to watch him.
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Of course, decorating a new home does take its toll, but so does raising children I’d assume.
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Apparently the last truck to unload arrived yesterday early in the morning. It was an official delivery truck from the local Sears, delivering a brand new refrigerator. I observed them unload it, cautiously move it into the O’Donnell house through the garage. An hour later, I saw the deliverymen leave, without taking anything with them.
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I couldn’t imagine that this family was living without a working refrigerator for more than a week. But they seemed to be living off of bounces and smiles, so much so I could hardly imagine them resting enough to even eat.
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Later that day, after the husband had returned home, I noticed him bringing out the large box the refrigerator came in, laying it in the lawn, and taking a box cutter and creating a make-shift swinging door on the side.
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His son was standing there, clapping, waiting to be the first resident in this new home, already, apparently, bored with the new home of his that was the O’Donnell’s.
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Later that evening, while my husband and I sat down to a simple dinner I had prepared earlier, the boy was still playing inside the refrigerator box, having convinced his father to create a window with the same box-cutter that had created the door.
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He spent what I thought was a good hour simply sticking his head out of the window, looking around, retreating and repeating.
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“It’s a crime that they can just stick their trash in the yard like that,” my husband said, dousing his dish with ketchup.
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“This better not be an indication of how they’ll behave for the long run.”
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Later in the week, at dusk time, my husband and I were enjoying a glass of wine on our front porch, looking north towards the mountain.
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Across the street, at the O’Donnell house, the new residents came out, the wife carrying the baby, and began walking through the front yard, pointing.
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They were clearly making plans for new landscaping.
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The husband would point, and the wife would smile, clearly in love and in love with what her man was proposing.
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The older son went straight for the refrigerator box.
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I could only hope that what they were planning wouldn’t significantly change the look of the O’Donnell property. I had always been a fan of their choices in landscaping, and had felt the environment to bring a comfort to the neighborhood. My husband, agreeing for the most part, only disliked the Dogwood tree that had been planted at the edge, if only because it was never trimmed.
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We sat there, sipping our wine, sternly nodding at one another. The family across from us, at the O’Donnell’s, continued pointing, smiling. And when the sun set, went back inside the house, presumably to bed.
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