Neigbors Redux

A little over three weeks ago, on the day Minnesota went under a ‘stay at home’ order, after a nice walk around the block, I posted about my neighbors. All kinds of neighbors. Neighbors I never knew I had. Neighbors everywhere. Neighbors I was somewhat fascinated with. Three weeks later and I’m seeing more and more neighbors and to be honest, enough is enough. I have enough neighbors at this point. And considering there were a lot of neighbors three weeks ago, and since I haven’t seen any ‘For Sale’ signs, how can I have more neighbors now?

Where are they coming from and where are they living?

And if that’s not mysterious enough to make you watch your back on a neighborhood walk, dig this: Back then there was a girl who rode a hoverboard and wore a cape and had an old black lab with a grey muzzle and belly. I haven’t seen either of them for three weeks. I have no idea where they disappeared to.

And this: There was a quaint elderly couple I was seeing in the mornings. No sight of either of them in three weeks.

And this: There was a woman with a crooked shoulder or neck and who didn’t seem to be very happy the times I saw her but then who can be too happy if they’re in pain, right? No sight of her either.

They’re all gone.

Poof!

Where are they all going?

And who are the new neighbors I see who are replacing them?

I haven’t seen any unusual vegetation or delivery trucks so I’m ruling out pods. I’m ruling it out for the time being at least and I’m reserving the right to revisit that theory in another couple of weeks if the neighbors continue to disappear and grow.

Maybe I was right to be a little suspicious of Mr. White Van. This is the neighbor with the large white van that has no side windows and who always has his van backed up to his open garage in the mornings with the motor running and the headlights on. Despite seeing him and his van a bunch of times now, it’s impossible to see what he’s loading or unloading. Three weeks ago I speculated that maybe he was unloading the bodies he’d collected overnight for whatever grim experiments he’s conducting in his basement. (Seriously, sounds goofy, I know, but you see that sort of thing all the time in movies and on TV shows so why not just down the block in suburban Minneapolis?) As the weeks passed and I kept seeing him at the same time in the morning, I decided that he was a contractor who supplied a line of vending machines around the cities and what he was loading in the morning were cases of chips and candy and the reason he was backed up so close to his garage was to A) save himself some walking, and B) not let anyone else see that he had 20 cases of Butterfinger candy bars stashed along with shelves of uber-tasty Whoppers malted milk balls and a passel of potato chips so they wouldn’t want to become his friend and eat him out of house and garage. But that was then and in these rapidly changing times I’m back to thinking about the grim experiments.

Experiments that are possibly being performed on a young girl and her dog, a quaint elderly couple and a woman with a crooked shoulder. And worse: experiments that could possibly involve the creation of new “neighbors” to walk the streets. And as I’m writing this on Monday April 20th at 2:25 pm and looking out my window, I just saw another “new neighbor” walk down the street. This guy was wearing jeans and a blue stocking cap and a bright orange vest like people wear when they go hunting. What’s he hunting? I can’t tell you what his face looked like because I closed my blind so he can’t see me see him. Until I know what, or whom, I’m dealing with I have to assume that they have superb (read: other-worldly) vision.

And if this isn’t enough, when I went for a walk earlier this afternoon I saw a baby garter snake. Isn’t there some mythology out there that tells us that snakes accompany bad things? And then there’s Yig the snake god.

Distressing times indeed.