Weed-Eating the West Bank

I did.

Weed-Eating the West Bank

I have a West Bank.

My property is located on a south-facing hillside, and there are banks to the roadway out front, and to the west, tapering down to the property of my physically-closest neighbor.

Just yesterday I ventured over there, to the other side of the high-board fence but still safely on my own property, to cut the high grass and weeds.

From my upstairs windows I could see over the fence, but I just never do. I lost that view when I built the fence, but the view was gone anyway. Such is not the case with my neighbor, who makes it a habit to peer over the fence into my backyard, from her high kitchen window,.

When I sat down to write this, I thought to myself, “You can’t even make this stuff up,” and that would be true.

I have lived here, in this location, since 1980. That’s forty-four years and counting. I’ve raised my children here, buried my pets here, cut a mountain of firewood here, worked here and defended my property from the township. That makes me by far, the longest resident in the area. I’ve seen people come and go, the road has been widened, the sewer has been installed and traffic has massively increased, since the police monitor the speed limit on the parallel state route.

Those things said, my place would appear to be a dumping ground for everybody else. The state drains the upper highway down one side of my property, and on the other, the neighboring development is protected from runoff by a long drainage ditch that empties into my woods, cutting deep gullies on its way down. Smack in the center, the electric utility maintains a powerline right of way, purchased from the property owner for one dollar in something like 1922. I have to battle the utility’s contractor every year to keep them from dumping herbicide on my watershed hillside, more difficult now that the contractors are using Mexican crews who don’t speak English.

None of that matters, of course, to anyone but me. When I moved here, everyone was soon a friend or at least, an acquaintance. Now people move in, park the RV in the driveway and disappear inside. I don’t associate with any of them, because they are decidedly unfriendly. And it isn’t my imagination.

But the worst one of all, the only one I actually fear, lives closest. A single woman with children, she’s absolutely crazy. I went to my overnight job two nights ago, and when I came home, my blue tick coon hound had dumped the couch cushions on the floor. She never does that. Could it be, then, that someone was at the window?

If so, I know who it was. I just don’t know why.

And that’s what worries me.

So, a spate of wet weather caused my lawn to overgrow, and I just recently got that caught up. My lawn looks nice again, the weeds are gone from between my down-front row of trees, and it finally occurred to me, the West Bank must still be overgrown. So I charged the battery on my electric trimmer, checked the line at the cutting head and ventured out.

I had my property surveyed just two years ago. The neighbor had been driving her lawn tractor clear over to the centerline of my first tree, which is six feet from the line. My home had been a farm, and all of the neighboring properties were sold off, sometime before I arrived and bought, so my property is what’s left, and it had never been surveyed. Now it has.

So I drove stakes in inside the surveyor’s pins, stretched a nylon cord between them close to the ground, and have not stepped over that rope even once. My neighbor’s response was to stop mowing any closer than three feet from that cord, so that it looks like I have high grass and weeds on my property.

Whatever.

This sounds like chicken shit, doesn’t it? But the reality of it is, she wishes me dead and would happily kill me if she knew she could get away with it. I worry that she’ll burn my house with my pets inside. She’s almost always home. She put her ex-husband in prison, years ago.

Some would say, it’s time to move. Well, I was here first, and I’ll probably still be here when most of my current neighbors are gone.

Then again, maybe not. There’s just, no way to know.

Now, Put yourself in the position of an Israeli.

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