Spring in Elsmere

Ahhh … spring in the bucolic hamlet of Elsmere. It’s a time when you can open your windows to the feel of a balmy breeze and take in the sounds of nature that the winter shut out. It’s also a time when you can hear all the cars with dysfunctional engines and people walking around having loud conversations.

The latest thing in our neighborhood is the kid walking around with a shopping cart. Those wheels sure do make a pleasant noise on the blacktop while I’m trying to watch TV. I believe pushing around a shopping cart when you’re nowhere near a store is the international symbol for “white trash.” There should be a sign with a silhouette of someone pushing a cart in a residential neighborhood to indicate this.

I don’t understand why people take so long to fix their cars. All winter someone was driving around a car with some kind of fucked up engine or transmission so even through the closed windows, we would hear this automotive whine that was just unhealthy. We haven’t heard that noise in awhile so I guess it’s fixed but the other night there was a minivan with bad brakes. It woke me up and in my half-asleep state, it sounded like a drunk driver in an out of control car screeching down the street and all I could think of was it would hit Steve’s parked car. Luckily, it was just someone who put off repairs to the car. Our block isn’t long enough to lose control of your car and screech out of control.

That’s why it kills me when people gun the engine between stop signs on our short block: They have to slam on their brakes in 50 feet anyway. Our block is a dead end at one end and at the other end it starts going one way so everyone has to turn. It’s impossible not to slow down. They’re not accomplishing anything but wasting gas so what’s the point?

When it was warm in March and I slept with the windows open, a fun loud conversation woke me up. Some girl was standing on the corner sobbing and screeching into her phone about how she didn’t know where she was. I guess someone had dropped her off in an unfamiliar neighborhood and she didn’t know where to tell the person on the other end to pick her up. I guess this was annoying but was there any reason to have a meltdown? There are ways to find out where you are. We have street signs and the firehouse is in walking distance and they will tell you where you are. We are part of civilization. It’s not like someone locked her in the trunk and dropped her off in the middle of the desert.

The high-volume fun is not limited to spring. Last winter they were doing utility work down the street in the middle of the night. It didn’t appear to be an emergency so there was no reason to do anything that late. I didn’t hear it but it kept Steve up. Luckily it was only one night because if they continued, I would have marched down the street in my pajamas and tell them I’d call the cops for making noise so late. We do have noise ordinances. Even if they had permission to do so, I was mad enough that I wanted to make their work night a little more inconvenient.

Nothing beats last spring’s open-window late-night spectacle. Someone up the street backed his truck into his shed and destroyed it. I awoke to a loud cracking noise and could hear all my neighbors saying “what the hell” from their houses. What killed me was even once this guy realized he hit something, he kept going until he was in his parking spot. His daughter came out and yelled at him and he said, “I never had any use for the shed anyway.” They took it down the next day.

God, I can’t wait til we close the windows and turn on the central air.