Welcome to the Neighborhood

My husband doesn't get a lot of air time on this blog, but I thought I'd share his thoughts on what happened the other day, then I'll say my feelings and you can proceed to talk me down.

"How to Ensure Your Neighbors Never Mow Their Lawn Again

Yesterday afternoon, we received our first "welcome" to the neighborhood in the form of an anonymous letter. Here's what it said:

'Welcome to Texas! Hope the move went well and you have started to settle in and find this an area that you would like to raise your family.

Don't know how you did it in UTAH, but around here we cut our lawns, weed eat and edge. Your neighbors would appreciate you doing the same!

If you need help doing so let someone know. If you chose to use a lawn service instead of doing it yourself, have at it, there are plenty around.

But, please help keep this neighborhood nice and pretty for use all!

Thanks'

So.......we have some passive aggressive neighbors.

First I feel like I need to defend my position. We've lived in the house for 1 month and 5 days, and in that time we've mowed the lawn once. In all honesty, I should have mowed the lawn last week, but because it was the Fourth of July, the lawn didn't look very long or scraggly, I decided to put it off for another week. The grass still isn't very long, it has just started to seed, though, and now definitely needs to be cut. Yesterday, as we were going on a walk and I had not yet seen the letter, I was talking about my plan to clean up the yard this weekend, including mowing the lawn, trimming, and weeding the front garden.

Now that I've defended myself, it's time to start complaining.

Two major things are wrong with this. I don't mind the idea that someone is asking me to mow my lawn. That is totally an okay thing to do with your neighbors. But 1 - Doing it anonymously so that I can't respond in any way, and 2 - insulting my home state and putting them in some kind of self-righteous position, Really bugs me.

Number 1 - I can't respond. This is my biggest problem with this note. If it were and aggressive not like this, and it had an actual salutation, I could actually go up to the person, and say that their aggressive approach is not effective, but I could still appologize for the lawn being too long. However, not knowing who the person was, I have no way to communicate my feelings about the situation, and the way I see it, I only have one way of communication, and that is...mowing my lawn. So, if I want to show disapproval of the note, I can communicate that by: Not Mowing My Lawn. If I do mow my lawn, that could be taken as an affirmative response to the note, and the notewriter can then smile to their self-righteous little selves, feeling that they've converted me from my heathen Utah ways to their correct and proper Texas ways. Neither of those are good options.

Number 2 - Insulting my home state. This is where the letter really came off as self-righteous. That one little sentence was absolutely unnecessary. If they had simply said, "we try to keep the neighborhood clean by mowing, trimming, and weed-eating our yards", I would have thought, "Okay, I can help with that." But an attack on my home state really brings the note to a personal level.

As a third annoyance, but not nearly as offensive as the other two, the note comes in the guise of a "welcome" note. NO ONE(!) in the neighborhood has stopped by to say "Hi" to us in any way. The only neighbors that I've talked to are the people two houses down that go to church with us (who I met at church, and are, in fact, from Utah) and the father-in-law of my next door neighbors, who doesn't even live at the house, and who I ran into while mowing the lawn the first time. These "friendly Texans" who take such good care of their lawns and who are such better people than we lowly Utahns, have really shown us what it means to be a neighbor in Texas. Thanks.

I'm not giving up on the neighborhood. I still love it, and I feel like it's a great place to be. There's just one bad egg, which you'll get in any neighborhood. Just, if you've ever considered writing a note like that, please, Please, PLEASE! keep it impersonal, make sure you sign your name so that they have a way to respond, and if it's someone new to the neighborhood, consider talking to them in person, welcoming them sincerely to the neighborhood before you go about trying to convert them to your ways."

That was a lot of words, so here's a cute picture to break it up.

Anyway, I dealt with this kind of thing as an RA in college, and from my experience, these kinds of notes stem from feelings of superiority, entitlement and fear. Johnny covered superiority, but obviously the anonymity covers entitlement and fear as well. My first reaction to this letter, was who do these people think they are. For all they know we have a little girl with leukemia and we moved to Texas to be close to a specialist and we've spent all our income and savings on medical expenses and we spend our time with our dying child instead of unimportant things like mowing the lawn.

My second thought is, I'm pretty sure 99% of our neighbors would consider themselves Christians, and what does the Bible tell us? When you have a problem with your brother, you go and talk to your brother first. Nothing resolves issues quite as fast as walking a mile in someone else's shoes. What is a neighborhood, but a giant family? And thanks to one anonymous person, my relationship in this new family will be slightly tainted, even though we are ignoring this letter.