Like A Good Neighbor

The neighbors are nice, but it almost seems like they're trying too hard to be nice. Like, going out of their way to do strange, little nice things for us. Example: yesterday as I was hacking down the holly bush (as in, destroying a plant), I commented to the neighbor that her flowers were coming in. Being that it's spring and all. She said that she'd used a big sprinkler full of fertilizer on her flowers, and attributed their blooming to this (I didn't have the heart to tell her that we had flowers blooming all over our backyard without the benefits of nasty, awful chemicals - I dedided the time to get all hippy on these folks hasn't come yet).

I nodded and said something nice. She then offered me the fertlizer. I looked at the plant I was in the middle of destroying, thinking I could make a snarky comment about not really needing it, but decided against this. I thanked her politely, and she slid it under the split-rail fence that divides our properties.

A few minutes later, Liz comes out to see how I'm doing. She gets the same treatment. Liz is typically the one who can refuse thing. I can be a bit of a pussy about not wanting to piss someone off or offend someone, especially if it's a) a person I have only recently met and b) a person I may have to spend a fair amount of time being around. For example, a new neighbor.

Maybe Liz really did take the fertilizer and go use it. I don't know. But I've kind of gotten the impression that she's trying to be super-nice to us, like she wants to convince us of sometime. I hate to say this, but it's setting off some of the same little sensors I developed as a social worker, when someone was trying to be super-polite and nice and all to distract me from the fact that they were beating their kids in the next room. Not that I'm saying that's what's happening, but it's got my screwed-up little imagination running.