The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I’m taking care of the neighbor’s chickens while they’re vacationing in Europe. Actually, I’m taking care of their hens while their usual chicken babysitters are vacationing in Oregon. The chicken coop, a veritable Trump Tower of a coop/aviary, sits right beside our joint property line so it’s no big deal to wander over and check the water, toss some chicken feed, gather up the eggs and cross back into my woods. The boys who usually handle this asked if I would check the house too, see if burglars had been prowling or were living in the mansion.

Some years back, shortly after the house was finished, the new owner was sunbathing in the privacy of her back yard and someone caught her sans swimsuit out on the lawn. That trespasser, she figured, being an amateur Sherlock Holmes, must be me since I live right next door. This created a bad start for our neighborliness as you might suspect. Nobody really wants to be accused of being a peeping Tom, but my neighbor kept asking friends of mine if they thought I was capable of this. Hell if I know what my friends probably told her, maybe worse than that. But she wouldn’t let it go and that dark cloud hangs over our mutual backyards like a constant threat of rain.

So I said no, I wouldn’t be caught dead or on video surveillance camera snooping around their house, just wasn’t worth the potential trouble to play security guard for them while they were vacationing on the Oregon coast. Michael mentioned that the owner had recently asked about me, whether I was a liberal or a redneck, a libertarian or a banjo whacker, a …. whatever? ‘What did you tell her?’ I asked. I’ve only lived next door to them for, oh, 15 years or so, how would they know what I was like, right? Admittedly they’re absentee chicken ranchers mostly, come up on holidays or a few special occasions, probably check on the trophy house, see if my buddies mowed and trimmed and pruned their fruit trees correctly. Rich folks. The kind of neighbors I love the most, especially the absentee part.

‘I told her you were a story teller,’ Michael said. We were next to the coop, chickens hopping up and down the escalator to the pen from the motel room style appointed laying bins. They were doing their cackle thing. A story teller, I repeated. What the hell does that tell her? A story teller is like, for her probably, a congenital liar, faux facts, Trump supporter, who knows what would run through her suspicious head?

I don’t know either what that means. A story teller? Well, okay, let’s roll with it. Stay tuned, is all I can suggest. If my chicken ranching neighbors have video cameras tuned to that chicken coop and find me prowling around their pen, I suspect we’ll have a sequel to this little story. If not, I get some free eggs and chicken shit on my boots. Life on the South End in these modern times … it’s never what I expect.

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