The down side to being relatively friendly with your neighbors is that they sometimes feel comfortable showing up at your front door on a Saturday afternoon trying to abuse your inborn southern politeness by making you watch some godawful 15-minute video for the multi-level marketing program pyramid scheme they’ve just gotten involved with.
It really sort of pisses me off that this sales pitch was the first excuse she found in three years to show up at our front door, but I’ll probably forgive her as long as she doesn’t follow through on her threat to call me for computer advice, too.
Are they related to me?
I just read an article that made me think of you; instead of emailing the link, it seems appropriate to put it here: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=707. What do you think?
There’s a lot of urban sociology on the subject of how important porches were to a neighborhood’s sense of community, and about proximity of the porch to the street due to yard size, etc. It works in denser areas too; just replace “porch” with “stoop.” Of course, TV and air conditioning were also big contributors, both of which also happened to appear at pretty much the same time.