Remember our neighbor Buddy? He’s an owner of one of the dogs who drives us crazy, “who” referring both to him and the dog. Anyway, he was out on his back step the other morning when I went out to our shed to retrieve some speakers I wanted to take to the thrift store, after helping a pack rat move.

So there I was, lugging the heavy speakers into the house, to take through to my truck parked out front, and there was Buddy, sitting on his back steps, two houses down, smoking a cigarette.

“Good morning!” he called out to me.

Feeling a bit as though my personal space had been violated from not so afar, and knowing that he could possibly think I hadn’t heard him, I failed to respond.

“Good morning!” he called again.

“Oh, hey, good morning, Buddy!” I called back.

“Are you moving?”

“Yep. Planning to!”

At some point in this conversation, or maybe it started even before the exchange, Buddy’s dog started barking at me or at the world, whichever.

“Ronnie, be quiet,” Buddy started. Oh no, I thought. Here we go.

In the next moments, Buddy did his best to out be-annoying his dog, to out-perro the perro. “Aww, Ronnie, stop! You’ll have to go inside! Nobody wants to hear you barking this early in the morning! Ronnie! Do I need to take you inside?”

Can we say empty threats? The next thing I knew, Buddy was shutting the door behind himself, the dog still out in the yard, still barking.

As I have previously noted, this dog problem (well, neighbor problem) is a detriment to home selling. Maybe, as my dear reader Dr. Perfection suggested, we should find some way to sedate the dogs while prospective buyers are present. Or, as my pastor suggested after reading an article in our local paper, maybe we should try out www.RottenNeighbor.com, although I’m guessing that further noting our neighbors’ deficiencies won’t help sell the house. My mother suggested listing “great for pets” as a perk, an idea our real estate agent turned down. At the moment, we’re letting the situation play itself out in hopes that someone just like our neighbors, but with money and much bigger dogs, will happen by.

At any rate, in case you were interested, I’d like to share M’s most recent dog experience with you. It took place just half an hour ago, while she was burying our compost in the garden:

Our “sermon” at church today was a picture show and report by an older couple who just returned from a service project to an orphanage in Tanzania. One picture, tucked in among the aerial views of the Swiss Alps as well as other pictures of banana and mango trees, lazy men, African community people, storks, an elephant, other missionaries, and undecipherable alligators, showed the entrance and menu of a favorite restaurant, “The Carnivore.”

“It was really good,” the lady said. “We ate liver, and ostrich balls, and–.”

It may have been just me, but I perceived an intense restraint zipping around the entire sanctuary of congregants, and I nearly blurted out, “What did they taste like?”

Yesterday I spent over three hours being reminded of an ever-vital life lesson as I helped an acquaintance move from her run-down, dingy apartment. A horse trailer and three pickup loads later, half of her belongings were stored in a garage adjacent to her new mobile home, which became available today.

I wasn’t the only person helping. Two ladies from church were packing boxes as one of the acquaintance’s grocery-store coworkers and I carried furniture and stuff, stuff, stuff down the stairs, where the husband of another coworker told us where to put the metal desk, the Christmas tree, the Halloween glow-in-the-dark skeleton someone had found in a closet, the grimy card table, the filing cabinet holding a folder labeled “loan documents. Throw away when I die” and old Hardy Boys books, an in-chair back massage thing, Rubbermaid box after Rubbermaid box of who knows what–you get the picture.

After our morning of work, the acquaintance went to buy pizza for us. Just before she came back, one of the coworkers explained to the church lady that she was going to “wash these” for the acquaintance, “these” being two brown owl hot pads. A bit later, though, after the pizza had arrived, I heard that coworker say to the other coworker, “I’ll put these out in the car now; she’ll never notice.”

It’s true–the moving lady really would never notice. Today, several men from church and I helped haul the rest of her belongings from her old apartment into her new trailer, and move her things from Saturday’s storage into, well, the same trailer.

The new landlady observed throughout. “My husband died twenty years ago, and so I’ve learned to do things on my own,” she said after I suggested waiting to load a dresser onto my truck to take from the garage to the trailer, and then she showed me how to load it easily. A bit later, as we walked towards the trailer, the landlady toed a flattened, dried up toad: “Oh, look at this toad; it’s croaked.”

Someone mentioned how good ice cream would be. “I don’t have ice cream,” the landlady said. “All I have is iced tea.” That sounded really good to me, since I’d given the second half of my water bottle to an older man who was helping and feeling dizzy, but she never brought any out to us.

In the trailer, the acquaintance was sitting on the couch, which was the one accessible piece of furniture besides her bed and the kitchen table. Everything and everywhere else, including in front of the kitchen sink, was piled high with boxes. What actually seemed rather spacious at first had quickly become jam-packed with, well, junk.

“I don’t even know what’s in most of these boxes,” she said. “I guess I’ll have to have a yard sale.”

Out in my truck, right now, in my driveway, is a large dresser that she didn’t want any more (and that would not have fit into her new home even if she did want it). I agreed to take it to the thrift store tomorrow.

I’m going to take some of our furniture, too. When it’s time for us to move, and people show up to help us, I know full well how they might feel to be enabling my stuff habits.

Several years ago I wrote a song called “Sleepy Tirade,” about being too tired and distracted to sleep. One line from the song is, “Someday, someday, those barking dogs will die.” This is not my general sentiment towards the neighborhood barking dogs, for I fault them not for being who they are. But that doesn’t mean they’re not a problem.

Our church’s vacation Bible school was this week. In addition to leading the VBS music, I was in charge of the offering project, which was to buy animals for Heifer International. We ended up collecting enough money to buy a pig, honeybees, rabbits, and geese. (Geese, according to Heifer’s literature, are good watchdogs.) Anyway, on Tuesday evening, while we were at church, our house was shown. According to our agent’s report, the walk-through went very well, but only until the prospective buyers reached the back yard and were blasted by the barking of dogs.

Now our dilemma is this: What should we do?

Nothing? After all, maybe the next shopper will love barking, and who needs annoyed neighbors?

Call the sheriff? I researched the ordinances again and yes, we would be justified, and maybe the neighbors would eventually tire of paying the fines, and get rid of the dogs.

Write a letter? Dear Neighbors: We have appreciated your kindnesses over the past years and will be sorry to leave our good neighbors. This week our house was shown to some prospective buyers. Our real estate agent said that the showing went really well until they went out into the back yard, where the barking dogs prompted them to say they will continue looking at other houses. We are, of course, disappointed, and wanted to express our frustration about the barking dogs. Not only have they been a nuisance to us personally, it appears that now they are a deterrence to potential buyers. Please get rid of the dogs, or put barking collars on them, or something (or maybe buy our house–it’d make a great rental!).

Talk to them? Maybe if they knew of our dilemma, they would willingly–tearfully?–repent and send their canines to faraway places.

We’re still thinking. Any ideas?

The bane of my existence in this townhouse has been not the neighbor teenagers chasing each other with sticks and lawn trimmers, not the street-front fist fights involving the same teenagers, not the cigarette-smelly exhaust from the same neighbor’s indoor, free-standing air conditioning unit blowing right onto our porch. None of these, my bane (although they’ve all been quite bane-ish, if not banish-able).

Rather, the bane of my existence here in this place is dogs. Barking dogs, howling dogs, dogs that know not that we care not what they think, although we do pity them, cooped up there in their insensitive owners’ small back yards, dogs whose owners are, in fact, the aforementioned (among others).

While we did (with good results) call the sheriff’s department about a different neighbor’s barking dog, a couple of years ago, we have refrained from doing so for the immediately adjacent neighbors, partly because we in no way want to jeopardize our friendly terms, and partly because the woman of the immediately adjacent, nicely air conditioned home, works for the sheriff’s department.

But today when M looked out the front door and said to me in a low voice, “Animal Control!” I snuck to the window, saying, “This day may change our lives forever.” Someone else must have done it! I thought, my heart swelling within. Done what I have for so long longed to do myself!

The truck was parked out there in the driveway, still occupied, I figured, since the brake lights were on. Perhaps the deputy is filling out his paperwork, I thought, or double checking the address. Or waiting, for something.

I continued my office work for the morning (perusing online real estate listings), until I saw the neighbor lady’s daughter’s van pull in. Kids piled out, calling, “Daddy!”

Daddy?

I was deflated. What could have become for our sanity’s sake a new day dawning had instead turned out to be an on-duty family reunion to gossip about so-and-so’s crumbling marriage and whatnot (yes, I could listen, up in my lonely writer’s garret).

For now, I will continue to do as M has taught me: When the dogs bark, instead of cursing, we sing the hymn “Dona Nobis Pacem.”