The House Next Door

Good Neighbors

People often ask us what’s up with the house next door. Is it abandoned? When I tell them no, they are shocked. The yard is nature run amok, untended not for years, but decades. The percent ratio of grass to weeds is 0 to 100. Ancient oaks and beeches are beautiful, but messy. They drop limbs along with leaves. There is wildlife in the mix, and by wildlife I don’t mean the suburban standards, squirrels and chipmunks, but foxes, deer, possum, raccoon. Rumor has it there’s a bobcat in there. I believe it. Late at night, something feral yowls.

Inside the overgrowth, a midcentury brick ranch molders away. There is moss on the roof shingles, and the satellite dish lists precariously. A battered maroon Cutlass Ciera is parked in the front yard when Gordon, the oldest occupant and the only one who can drive, happens to be home. Gordon lives with his younger brother and sister, but lest you are envisioning twenty-something slackers, Gordon is 73, brother Dave 69, and sister Margaret, 65. The Kellogg siblings have lived in this house their their entire lives.

Of course, something’s off. Margaret, hair down to her knees, once red, now white, never leaves the house. Dave dons his backpack every day at 2 p.m. and walks the exact same route through the neighborhood to the Walgreen’s parking lot and back again. Gordon, by far the most outgoing, is amiable but unkempt. Imagine homeless Santa Claus, and I’m not being mean, I just want you to get an accurate visual. He dresses in outfits cobbled from Goodwill bin finds, like nurses’s smocks and mesh T-shirts. Years ago he adopted a pit bull named Mia, who is his constant companion, muscular and multi-teated, straining against the leash while slobbering copious amounts of ropy drool.

But, as eccentric as they are, as much as their house might be called an eyesore, they are lovely. Gordon brings over chew toys for Charlie, and Margaret bakes us pumpkin bread at Thanksgiving. If an emergency had me knocking on their door, they would not hesitate to let me in.

Some in the neighborhood have complained that the Kelloggs’ neglect may be criminal blight. I get it. I even realize having a falling-down house next door might lower our own property value. But when I see the dapper guy from one street over whose immaculate lawn abuts ours blowing his leaves into our yard when he thinks we’re not looking, I think about what makes for good neighbors, and it has nothing to do with landscaping, and everything to do with respectful co-existence, which Robert Frost would agree is the ultimate good fence.

The Kelloggs make good neighbors.