DEAR NEIGHBORS...

We have a request.  While we are sympathetic to the woes of a remodel job, having gone through a couple ourselves, I’m sure you know that we have endured an awful lot from your project.  We have lost a lovely hedge, replaced by a bland, and to us rather unattractive fence.  We have suffered through dirt and dust, the racket and vibration of power tools, the traffic problems incurred by pickups and cement trucks, the salsa music on the radio, the drilling and hammering, the piles of construction materials, the accumulation of debris, and the overflowing trash cans…  It feels like this has been going on for years.

After all of which, we long for the restoration of our lovely Buddha garden.  Time was, we would wake to the gentle sound of water flowing from the bamboo pipe and look out into a scene of tranquility and serenity that never failed to delight.  Now, we look out and see our fish pond emptied of water—except for the static pool at the bottom that we fear will serve as a breeding ground for mosquitoes; a once attractive wooden fence with its flourishing green vine, now gap-toothed and unfinished at the bottom, its vine long dead and withering; a lantern not yet replaced in its former standing position; a piece of cardboard filling a still-unfixed hole in the fence; a garden gate still propped open with a temporary brace…

I don’t quite know how to describe what this all means to us.  It’s a kind of permanent psychic disturbance, a loss of the serenity we treasured, the inner peace and quiet that the Buddha garden assured us every morning on awakening and every night on retiring. 

Is it not possible, now, finally, to expedite things on our side of the fence and have your workers properly restore this little garden to its former state?  To fix the fence—not just a patch job, but really fix it to look as it did before?  To refill the pond and get the water running once again?  To replace the lantern properly and get the lighting system working again?  We have been mindful about neighborly relations through this entire process; we have been mild and friendly, we trust, in our complaints and requests.  It seems to me that this is little to ask, after so much patience from our side of the fence.

Best, Ellie & Peter

PS  There is one other relatively minor issue: the two-by-four that was used to fill the gap behind our trash cans is shorter than is needed.  Check it out.  It's just a sloppy, thoughtless job, done in haste, without respect or care.  A minor irritation, but it could so easily have been done properly.