I Have Good Neighbors, Sorta...

Out here on my little dead end road we are good neighbors. That means everyone kind of keeps to themselves in an unspoken agreement to mind their own business. My next-door neighbor, a hard working young man and his wife are some of those people with a travel trailer who go off to work only returning occasionally to mow the yard, take the boat to the lake and then do it all over again. There's another small house on the property that he seems to rent in a short term manner to women with children. They don't stay long and I don't know much about them other than learning first names to say hello. I can't imagine the rent being much and they seem to move on along, hopefully to bigger and better things. Right now there are two young women, a baby and Roscoe living next door. 

Roscoe is a Feist dog. He's not a full on outside dog and I can kind of imagine him usually in his Alpha male position of on the couch napping at most times. My boat garage abuts his territory and when he hears me doing my old man piddling in this structure he must cause a disturbance in the house that they can only remedy by putting him outdoors when on sighting me he proceeds to, in the words of my late father, "pile a good cussing" on the perceived threat. He also kicks dirt while doing all this barking which was probably a behavior evolved by this breed of dog over a millennium to make themselves look bigger than they were to the animals they were trained to hunt but in modern lay on the couch times it serves to uncover the feral cat landmines in the sandy yard dirt and the tasty candy buried there.           

The first few incidents of this behavior his master appeared and reined him in and apologized saying, "I don't know why he's acting like that." Another time, trying to analyze Roscoe's aggression she said, "he must really like you." Since then she no longer mediates and Roscoe's incursions sometimes reach my porch. I take that her declining interest means we are left to develop the relationship on our own. I have begun to fantasize about Roscoe captured in a landing net that hangs in the boat garage. There's actually two nets, a short handled one and one with a longer handle. I think I'm going to need the longer handle one.      

Of course there is that old silver lining that you find in most situations and I am a glass half full kind of guy. As long as I don't get bit, infected and lose a foot there will be declining amounts of cat candy in the yard. If someone asks I'll say, "Yeah, that Roscoe, he a good neighbor."