Neighborly

My parents-in-law are moving from the Field of Dreams state to the Land of 10,000 lakes. I'm not sure why they would want to leave Iowa. It gets greener earlier, has a shorter winter, cheaper houses, less traffic, and fewer mosquitoes. Plus, they have great neighbors.

On the other hand, it does have a heckuva lot of hogs. And they smell.

But they also have wind farms, so yanno...it'd be cool to say that you were from a state that had wind farms.

Wind farms notwithstanding, they are leaving all of that behind to move up by their grandchildren.

But back to the neighbor thing. They have (and are themselves) the kind of neighbors that give each other Christmas gifts. Nothing pricey, more of the homemade jelly variety of neighbors, but nevertheless thoughtful. They know the names of all of their neighbors' pets, stop to chit chat about new cars, you know, friendly sort of relationships.

Hopefully they'll find such people in their new home up here. They just won't find them in my neighborhood.

For example, when we were first moving into our new house from our apartment, we had to get rid of some furniture that just didn't make the cut. Two ratty old chairs were placed on the curb for the garbage collector to properly dispose of. While we were out making another furniture run to the old apartment, the chairs disappeared from the drive way. Later that week we saw the same chairs in one of our new neighbor's garage sale. Ummm...I get wanting to take furniture from the end of someone's driveway for your own use, but for your own garage sale?

And then there were the renters that lived right next to us. We would wake up in the morning sometimes and find plastic lawn chairs stacked up outside of our bedroom window. Full disclosure: we never actually caught anyone peeping, but c'mon, is "please don't stack your Menards furniture next to our bedroom window so that you can be at eye level" a necessary conversation?

The renters have since been evicted and I think three gay guys have taken over the house. Unfortunately the garage sale lady is still living across the street, but we don't really hear anything from her--except when she's barking at her dog.