A dream home, perfect street,
and uptight neighbors

Robyn’s Hood
By Robyn McCloskey

Like George and Louise Jefferson of the mid-1970s hit sitcom The Jeffersons, my family and I spent last weekend movin’ on up.
The lease on the house we were renting was coming to an end, and at the same time, dear friends of ours were ready to downsize. Yes, sadly I am old enough to have friends who are empty-nesters, but I am not going to dwell on that today.
It seems our older friends were looking to unload their home and made us what members of the Corleone family might describe as an offer we couldn’t refuse.
But we refused it, at first, anyway. The house was a little too out of our price range and a little too out of our league. It’s in one of those well-kept, suburban cookie-cutter don’t-come-home-drunk-neighborhoods (if you do, you might have trouble recognizing your perfectly landscaped beige stucco home from the 32 other perfectly landscaped beige stucco homes).
Anyway, after much deliberation, we decided to take our friends up on the deal, since it was either that or homelessness. And so began the process of purging and packing the stuff in our current home to make the move to our new home.
My husband and I had our fair share of arguments about this; my philosophy is don’t stand still or I will put you in the trash, which clashes with his philosophy of you never know when you might need the remote to a television you no longer have.
Somehow we made the necessary compromises. I’m happy to say we’re now getting familiar with our latest — and hopefully final — abode, or at least the one right before our children send us packing to a retirement village in Florida.
But movin’ on up got me thinking that if our homes and neighborhoods reflect who we are, then I must admit that this place is not quite us. It’s so quiet and peaceful, so refined, so . . . beige. Everything in the house, as well as around the neighborhood, seems to be in working order. Nothing stands by in need of attention. No dented garage doors, no abandoned bikes in the driveways. No window screens clinging for dear life to a sill, no winter sleds left out in summertime yards.
It is all so pristine, so perfect, so Stepford-ish. So unlike the previous homes that were reflections of us, nice enough, but still a little rough around the edges. Not too much to complain about but still in need of repair.
All of our houses had their good points, but they also had the stuff we hoped no one would notice. Because my husband and I originally are from the more colorful sections of Philadelphia, having spent our formative years in Fox Chase and Parkwood respectively, we prefer neighborhoods with a little personality, a little character, a little unpredictability.
Not the white-washed haven where we now find ourselves. And so it is with very mixed emotions that we find our not-so-perfect selves sleeping in an oh-so-perfect dream home.
But it seems as though my husband and I unwittingly have made it our mission to lower the bar of the neighborhood. No more homogenous perfection, no more colorlessness.
We’ve already left furniture at the curb with a homemade sign that says FREE. We have paint cans full of colors from previous homes airing out on the front lawn. And for the moment we’re unable to open either garage door; they’re so stuffed to the gills (with my husband’s prized possessions of course) that I’m worrying non-stop about a concussion for anyone who even tries.
After only two days of residency, one of our new neighbors stopped by presumably to say hello. It was the woman who heads up the "association," the "friendly" group of people who determine how many trash cans each house is allotted, what color the back of your window treatments can be, and the hours when it’s OK for your children to bounce a basketball.
She wanted to "welcome" us to the neighborhood by rattling off the list of grievances already mounting against us. Seems these people don’t appreciate the generosity of free furniture and the privilege of knowing the colors of walls in our previous homes.
As it stands now, I feel as though my life is a bit of a TV sitcom, a sort of Gladys Kravitz meets the Clampetts. But I guess we’re going to have to get used to our new neighborhood, just as it will have to get used to us, because like George and Weezy, we may have moved on up but we’re not movin’ out, even if we never fit in. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net