Charlie and me were out for a Sunday drive, and happened to pass Agnes Brown’s place out on Duck Pond Road.
“Slow down, Charlie. Look, Aggie’s got ladders up!”
“Ida, them ladders been up over a year.”
“No!”
“Seen them there last winter, under a foot of snow.”
“There should be a law! You are not allowed begin another home improvement project ‘til you’ve finished the last one.”
“Or in Aggie’s case, the last ten or twenty projects.”
“Wow! What a way to live!”
“One year, Ida, I kid you not, I think she put up one shingle.”
“Come on!”
“Really. Billy Pritchard told me. He lives in the grey house over there. Keeps an eye on her progress.”
“Or lack thereof. She a good starter, I’ll give her that.”
“But that’s where it ends. See them piles out front? Shingles. Billy says they’ve been sitting there so long, there’s
moss growing on ‘em.”
“And who knows what’s living underneath that crap.”
“Well, that’s where the fire department found her ferret. Guess she was some upset when he escaped from the house.”
“Can you imagine what it smells like in there. Ferrets? Yuck! Remember when she had that apartment out back and her tenant fixed it up all nice. Then, Aggie asked her to leave so she could move into the apartment, her house was so bad?”
“Yup. Check out that fence the neighbors put up.”
“Wow. That’s a big one.”
“And who could blame ‘em?”
“Can’t the fire department do something about it? All that mess must be a fire hazard.”
“Hey, we’ve given her a written warning, and she was real nice about it. ‘I’ll fix it! I’ll fix it!’ But truth is, we can’t do nothing until something happens. Fire, or a kid gets hurt.”
“She boards cats and dogs, you know.”
“That’s what I heard.”
“There’s no way I’d let Scamp stay there. He’d come back with who knows what. The whole thing gives me the heebee jeebees.”
“Maybe you should leave her one of your Neighborly Note. You know, a punch list of all the stuff that needs attention.”
“Honey, there ain’t a Post-It in the world big enough!”
That’s it for now. Catch you on the flip side!
Hear Ida Tell: One Shingle a Year