For Wilshire Baptist Church
There’s been a lot of activity across the street in recent weeks and I’ve not liked it. It’s been noisy and distracting and I prefer the neighborhood to be calm and quiet.
It started after the folks living across the street sold their house and moved away. A new owner came in and began getting it ready as a rental, and that brought a steady stream of work crews ranging from a handyman outfit sprucing up the interior and exterior to a paving company putting in a new driveway and sidewalks. There’s been lots of noise and traffic across the street but also at our curb with men in trucks and trailers sorting through tools and material and mixing paint in front of our house.
I’ll admit that I’ve been overly watchful from the second-story window of my home office. I’ve even been outside a few times, especially when I saw a man with a hand sledge and some wooden stakes walking down our sidewalk. I found that he had dug two large holes in the corners of our lawn and driven in stakes festooned with red streamers. So I asked him about it and he said they were cleaning up the deed and plat for the house across the street, and they were starting their surveys from our corners. I reminded him that we had a sprinkler system and he said he was careful about that and promised to remove the stakes when they were finished. Apparently he forgot to do that and left it to me to remove the stakes and replace his football-sized divot.
The biggest, loudest day was when the concrete truck came with all its groaning and beeping and a dozen men running around, shouting and sloshing around in the slurry. It was a dawn-to-dusk event that followed a week of demolishing old concrete and building the framework for the new pavement.
If I was working at an office somewhere, I’d have been oblivious to most of this. I’d have come home in the evening and wondered, “So what did they do today?” and then I’d look out to see what had changed, if anything, from the day before. But I’m home 24/7 for the most part, so I didn’t just see the daily progress; I saw the machinations required to create that progress.
But wait a minute — wasn’t the house from which I’ve watched this no more than a vacant lot just 10 years ago? And didn’t we build a house on that lot, and didn’t that take nine long months? And didn’t our lot have to be replatted, which meant someone walked around and drove stakes in our neighbor’s corners so our property lines could be verified?
I can’t even begin to imagine what our neighbors experienced and endured for those nine months. Anyone who has been near a home construction site knows the catalog of noises: nail guns, hammers, power saws, diesel motors, generators, compressors, the beep-beeps of delivery trucks and forklifts. And then there’s the traffic created by all those people and vehicles that often begins at dawn and doesn’t end until sunset.
It seems to me I need to calm down a little and go with the flow. Change is often messy and noisy; it’s just the sights and sounds of progress, and good progress at that. The house across the street needed improvements, and there’s no arguing that it looks better than it has in the years we’ve lived across from it. Interior photos posted on a real estate site show a small but attractive house that will make a great home for someone. And a little sleuthing reveals that other rentals owned by these landlords are in excellent shape, which means they do a good job of finding tenants that will care as much about the property as they obviously do.
Sometime soon we’ll have new neighbors and with any luck we’ll be getting to know them, and we will have forgotten about the days of noise and distraction. Already, I’ve walked across the street and met the owner/landlords and given them an information card about our voluntary neighborhood association. I put on a mask to go over there, and while they couldn’t see my face, I hope they sensed the spirit of a good neighbor and not that of the curmudgeon who growls at the world from the upstairs window.