The lady across the street died last week. She was known in the neighborhood as the "crazy lady" or just as " the witch". As she aged I think she became a little bit nicer.. I never had a problem with her though I did see what she used to do to deserve her name..
If a ball bounced over on her grass, she would angrily yell at the kids to get off her property. If she was inside when this happened, she would angrilly rap on the window, arms flailing in the air, mouth moving and twisting this way and that in exaggerated frustration. One year when the school bus driver decided that in front of her house was a covenient place to stop, she couldn't stand it, and when the horrible little kids sat on her big tree stump one morning, the next day the tree stump was covered in goo with nails driven into the top of it. Not too much longer after that, the bus picked up the children in front of another house.
The only problem my husband and I had with her was when we first moved in across the street from her. We had parked our pick up in front of her house since the moving van took up our driveway and our other car was in front of our house. When we went outside the next day, there was a note scrawled on a piece of paper on the pick up windshield.."Park your cars and trucks in front of your own house!" Apparently she never knew that the street wasn't her domain as well.
So, I look over there, at her empty house, with the unlikely pink Spring wreath on her front  door, the property she once zealously guarded looking stark and empty, and I wonder if all the meaness she spewed during the years was worth it. She had lost her husband a long time ago I had heard and had raised her 2 kids as a single mother, never marrying again, her cats and her property her priorities.. Many days I'd see her in her favored mumus, grumbling to herself as she caught sight of a piece of litter near her curb..She'd march up to it, pick it up, walk it to the middle of the street, look bothways, then throw it, so that it fell beyond what she considered her property line.
Now all that she considered important lays silent, all the things she could have done in her life to help someone lay silent, and if walls could talk I bet you could hear her sad little house draw a big sigh.