For 35 years, my laundry routine was sacred… until my new neighbor, armed with grudge and a grill, started firing it up the moment my pristine sheets hit the clothesline. It seemed petty at first. Then it got personal.
But in the end, I had the last laugh. Some people mark the seasons by holidays or weather. I mark mine by which sheets are on the line: flannel in winter, cotton in summer, and those lavender-scented ones my late husband Tom used to love in spring.
After 35 years in the same modest two-bedroom house on Pine Street, certain rituals become your anchors, especially when life has stripped so many others away. I was pinning up the last of my white sheets one Tuesday morning when I heard the telltale scrape of metal across concrete next door. “Not again,” I muttered, clothes pins still clenched between my lips.
That’s when I saw her: Melissa, my neighbor of exactly six months. She was dragging her massive stainless steel barbecue grill to the fence line. Our eyes met briefly before she looked away, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
“Morning, Diane!” she called out with artificial sweetness. “Beautiful day for a cookout, isn’t it?”
I removed the pins from my mouth. “At ten in the morning on a Tuesday?”
She shrugged, her blonde highlights catching the sun.
“I’m meal prepping. You know how it is… busy, busy!”
I had to rewash an entire load that came out reeking of burnt bacon and lighter fluid after one of Melissa’s smoky meal prep sessions. When she pulled the same stunt that Friday while I was hanging clothes on the line, I’d had enough and stormed across the lawn.
“Melissa, are you grilling bacon and lighting God knows what every time I do laundry? My whole house smells like a diner married a bonfire.”
She gave me that fake, sugary smile and chirped, “I’m just enjoying my yard. Isn’t that what neighbors are supposed to do?”
Within minutes, thick plumes of smoke drifted directly onto my pristine sheets, the acrid smell of burnt bacon and steak mingling with the scent of my lavender detergent.
This wasn’t cooking. This was warfare. “Everything okay, hon?” Eleanor, my elderly neighbor from across the street, called from her garden.
I forced a smile. “Just peachy. Nothing says ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ quite like smoke-infused laundry.”
Eleanor set down her trowel and walked over.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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