Our House, in the Middle of Our Street

Yesterday my husband called and asked "Want to know what type of excitement I have had this afternoon?"  This is never a phrase you want to hear.  Apparently, he went to start an old car we have on our property and heard a whoosh sound. The dead grass under the car caught on fire.  All the retired neighbors spotted the fire, one called 911 and a firetruck was dispatched.  Luckily, my husband was able to get a water hose that reached to that part of the property in time to put out the fire before the firetruck arrived.  God was watching over my husband, our property and the surrounding homes.  As I was telling my co-worker about the "excitement," I guess the stress got to me and I started giggling thinking about all the weird things that have happened to us while living there. 

(Our front yard, scene of the melee.)

I guess the first "strange" episode was a few months after Roger and I got married.  We were going to bed one night when we heard voices in our backyard.  Roger went to investigate and said that the couple across the street were in our yard arguing.  We watched them from our living room window and the guy started hitting the lady.  He got her down in our yard and was pounding her face into the ground!  I told Roger to get his gun.  He refused so I called 911 and told them that one of our neighbors was pounding his wife's face into our front yard.  It seemed like forever before the two cop cars arrived and by the time they did, the neighbors had moved back to their own yard.  Apparently the wife had stabbed the husband with a knife at our other neighbor's house.  (We live in a quite neighborhood in a good part of town despite what it might sound like.)  The cops finally sent the wife to her brother's house and we thought the excitement was over for the night until the husband appeared in our front yard - again - this time with a flashlight.  So I called 911 back and told them.  The dispatcher said "Maybe he is looking for his finger."  I was like "What????"  She was joking and that's when she explained that the wife had stabbed the husband.  So they dispatched cops, again, to our house.  Apparently the husband had lost his keys while pounding his wife's face into the ground and had come back to search for them.  The cops explained to him the whole concept of trespassing in the middle of the night and he left.  Little did we know that he went to get his wife and brought her home where she entered through the bedroom window which seemed weird to us.

(The duplex of the neighbors is in background)


The next "odd" occurrence was on our anniversary.  We were enjoying a nice dinner when we heard a loud noise.  We rushed to the door just in time to see a  hit-and-run accident.  I called...you guessed it....911 and gave a description of the car as it drove away.  The hit-and-run driver saw me on the phone hanging out the front door and decided to give himself up to the cops.  At one point in the evening, the victim of the hit-and-run was kneeling down in front of the cross in our yard, blue lights were flashing in the background, and the cops were administering a sobriety test on the other driver in the middle of our road.  It was like watching a "Cops" episode with the theme song "at the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light" in the background instead of "Bad Boys."  The cops arrested the drunk driver/hit-runner and cited his victim for not having insurance. 

(Our cross in the background of this picture.)

 
My husband requested a road sign that states "dangerous intersection" be installed mid-way on our hill as a warning of the hidden intersection - the location of the accident.  We also had a sign put up in our yard that said "no dumping" because people were bringing their empty wine boxes (yes, classy I know), liquor bottles and trash and dumping it in our yard!  After the sign went up, no more trash went down.

One day as we were driving up the hill to our house we noticed a woman at our 80-year-old neighbor's house.  I said "Oh, John's got a girlfriend."  The more we studied "her" we realized that it was our neighbor JOHN (who was also my church's organist).  He was walking up the hill with a wig on his head during a thunderstorm.  I told my husband "I can imagine what the obituary will say now, 'Local church organist struck by lightning while wearing a woman's wig.'" 

One evening my brother-in-law, my mom, Roger and I went to dinner.  When we got back, not only was my brother-in-law's car rolled, someone had wrote"Just married" on the rear window and taped the empty toilet paper tube to the windshield.  Our crazy neighbors did it.  (Of course, my brother-in-law had been "just married" about 3 times and was still kinda married...but that's a whole other blog entry.)

PS
For those of you who were born after 1985, the title of this blog entry is an old 80s song.