Mr. Anderson and the Tough Woman with the Yellow Hair

I live in a small town. A unique, well-defined, little community in the shadow of a booming metropolis. First ring suburb, aging, middle class. Houses close together, all alike, one right after the other. You don’t even have to be paying attention, and sometimes, you can hear your neighbors arguing.
Some people might think this is a big, bad city. 45,000 disparate souls, packed onto tiny parcels of real estate, moving in and out of neighborhoods without ever knowing the names of the people who live near them. Children attending schools that have become ominous with locked doors, issues relating to race relations and a blind eye to the drugs and weapons that proliferate in the deteriorating halls. Colors and cultures of people who don’t look or act like the neighbors we used to know.
But to me, it’s just a small town, the one I didn’t choose to live in when I was born, but the one I have chosen to live in as an adult. My children attend the same schools I attended, love and hate the same teachers I loved and hated. They buy candy and comic books at the stores where I bought candy and comic books. Play at the same parks, swing on the same swing sets, bike on the same bike trails.
I know my neighbors, perhaps not as well as my mother knew hers, but I know them well by today’s standards. I know their names, their professions and enough to know whether they are here to stay or just marking time until the next real estate surge gives them an economic reason to move up and out. Doug to the left (real estate sales – he’ll be gone in five years), Ann and John to the right (software development and marketing – they’ll stay through the birth of their second child), Mr. Anderson across the street (retired – he’s a lifer on the block).
And then, there is “the house”, the rental property, the duplex, the property with dirt for a front yard, a trio of women whose professions are dubious, a pack of children (number uncertain), ages ranging from 3 to 12, colors ranging from white to tan to brown to black, and cars and people and police officers coming and going at all hours of the day and night.
The head of this household is a tough woman with yellow hair, orange, pot marked skin and a foul mouth. Her relationship with Mr. Anderson, her next-door neighbor, is tenuous at best. He spends most of his time from March through October each year keeping watch over the neighborhood, and his yard in particular, from an old, aluminum, folding chair he keeps perched on his front step. And she spends most of her time offending the majority of neighbors by her very essence – her brashness, her out-of-control household management style and the fact that she doesn’t care that her life and its lack of conformity by normal middle class standards shocks us and affects our property values.
One particular Saturday afternoon a few summers ago, they had an intense verbal altercation when one of her five motley dogs pooped, for the umpteenth time, on his perfectly manicured front lawn. For once, Mr. Anderson gathered his courage and told this tough woman with the yellow hair that he didn’t like it, not one bit, and would she please get control of her dogs, her children, her household and just everything that puts a blight on our neighborhood.
She responded as you might expect, with a slew of profanity that called into question Mr. Anderson’s character, his manhood, his age, his intelligence. And all of us who happened to be working or relaxing in our own yards that afternoon and heard the entire exchange, stood, holding our collective breath, waiting to hear and see what would happen next. When the tough woman with the yellow hair screamed at the top of her lungs, “Deal with it, you f***ing old man, you’re not getting rid of us! We’re here to stay!!”, the argument ended. She turned her back on Mr. Anderson and marched into her rundown house, and Mr. Anderson stood speechless and helpless in his driveway.
Almost 3 years have passed since that unsettling bit of human drama took place just across the street from my house. Mr. Anderson still has the greenest lawn on the block and plants dozens of bright red impatiens plants on either side of his front walk each spring. And he still keeps watch from that folding chair on his front steps. The woman with the yellow hair still lives across the street, next door to Mr. Anderson. Her children come around when they are selling candy for school fundraisers. They help us look for our dogs when they get loose. They wave as they ride their bikes up and down our street. Some of the little ones even sit with Mr. Anderson on his front step on warm summer evenings. And the garden that the woman with the yellow hair planted last summer is beginning to bloom and looks almost pretty sitting in the middle of the patch of dirt that passes for a front yard.
I live in a small town.