Appearance-wise the area I live in would probably be considered suburban but geographically, we live within New York City. My personal view of suburbia is more like Wisteria Lane on Desperate Housewives so I’m still holding out for that.
In my neighborhood, there are lawns, there are backyards and most of the houses are 1 family homes. (We won’t discuss the illegal 2 family homes because then people will find out I posted about that and they will come to beat me up.) The lots are relatively small, typically 40 X 100, with about 10 feet of space in between houses.
I wanted to go outside with a tape measure and stick it through the fence so I could report the exact distance between my house and my neighbor’s but then they’d be wondering what the heck I was doing, which would require an explanation and I don’t like talking to them so you will just have to settle for my estimate of 10 feet, give or take a foot or 2.
Living in such close proximity to your neighbors can be good or bad, depending, of course on who lives next door. On our block, most of the people are quiet and considerate. There are only 2 families who are really noisy and inconsiderate. Those are the ones who live on either side of me.
This rambling is actually leading to a point. You needed to know just how close we live to our neighbors in order to fully appreciate the horrifying event that occurred several years ago, when my daughter was only 3. It happened early one evening when I was painting her room. I was doing the section of the wall by the windows. I made the mistake of looking out the window. Her bedroom windows face our neighbor’s bathroom window. Now in my opinion, when you live close enough for your neighbors to be able to spit into your bathroom sink from the comfort of their own home, you should at least close the shade or close the nice frosted window that they install in bathrooms to give a person some privacy. No such luck (or modesty?) here. There was my neighbor, larger than life, sitting on the bowl.
I probably would have painted over her windows, sparing her from having to view such things because if she thought that was what all naked men looked like, she would probably have decided right then never to get married. However, the fact that she was only 3 and, therefore, the top of her head didn’t even clear the window sill made such drastic measures unnecessary. Those neighbors moved years ago and, thankfully, the people who live there now do know how to close windows and shades.
