JENSIZED LAST ACTIVITY IN MEMPHIS TOWN

The dark side of East Memphis living ?

By Jen

I like to think we’re pretty good neighbors. We keep to ourselves. We don’t have loud parties. In fact, we rarely have company because most of our friends live in Midtown and don’t want to drive home drunk. (What can I say, I’m a good hostess.) Brian does the best he can to keep the yard looking presentable.

We’re friendly with the woman across the street. Hell, we’re friendly with her even though her daughter — long story — called Brian fat to his face. We adore the family that lives on one side of us. The woman on the other side, however, can’t stand us.

She didn’t like the people who lived here before us. But none of our other neighbors did either so I thought nothing of it.

Until she trashed us to the guys who were doing our landscaping, who also happen to be friends of Brian’s.

So, Grizzlies fans, I present to you our new chant: a mantra that’s as Made in Memphis as grit ‘n’ grind and dry rub.

“I don’t know why you’re even bothering,” she told them. “They have the worst yard on the street.”

We hadn’t been living here long, and one of the things about owning a home is having to … y’know… WORK to be able to pay for it. We were doing a lot of that. And we were doing a lot of work on the inside of the house. That was our top priority, seeing as we live inside the building and not in the yard.

Brian and his dad have done a lot of work on the property since then. I thought we were beyond all this. Sure, the lady next door never waves when I see her outside, and I swear sometimes she even gives me the stink-eye. But her opinion of us is pretty close to the bottom of my list of GAFs.

I opened our mail today and there was a letter from Code Enforcement.

It was about our ”junked automobile parts, refrigerators, stoves and other chattels.” Or, if you’re not melodramatic: a tire and a couple boards next to our detached garage, which you can’t see from the street.

Someone — and I have my suspicions — called Code Enforcement about this.

It’s not as if Code Enforcement saw it while patrolling the neighborhood. Does anyone actually patrol the neighborhood for code violations? If an old tire and a few boards behind a house are all they found you’d think Forbes magazine would have more nice things to say about this city.

No. One of our neighbors is a trifling bully and called the city on us. And I have my suspicions as to who it is.

View of our garage from the driveway. Eat your heart out, Prince Mongo: THIS is what a code violation looks like.

You can’t see it from the street. But that’s where it’s going. Today. And it’s going to sit there until trash pickup day … which is Monday.