Neighbors from Across the Street

by Dan Rietema

It all started one day, when I was about five years old. I was just having some fun in my front yard, kicking around a soccer ball. I had my net up, and was practicing for my game the next day. One of my shots came off my foot wrong, and sailed through the air into the neighbor’s yard.

"Uh oh" I thought to myself, for not 20 feet from my ball was my neighbor, standing there giving me that ‘What-are-you-doing-on-my-yard-little-boy’ look. Now this was not a little old lady neighbor, but he was a big guy, who was about 50 or so, and was the scariest person I had ever seen before. I was hoping that if I didn’t look at him he wouldn’t notice me, so I walked over there and was just about to get my ball when he said, "Hey! What are you doing on my yard, kid?" Now that I look back on it, he probably said something more along the lines of, "Please be careful on my lawn", but being of the age that I was, People who I didn’t know who gave me rules to follow were scary grouches. So after grabbing my ball, I ran inside and never played in my front yard again for quite a while.

A few weeks later, the same scenario went down in my front yard, but this time my mom was on hand to introduce me to the "grouch", who turned out to be a nice old guy who had 8 grandchildren.

A few years later, when I was in sixth grand, he asked me to mow his lawn for him. I accepted the job, and during that summer I got to know him and his family really well, and he turned out to be not such a grouch after all.