Crazy Neighbor story time!

I know this is supposed to be a knitting blog, but I haven't been knitting much lately. I couldn't let this blog just sit here doing nothing, so I decided to share a childhood memory.

I was five when we moved into the house on Amana Ct. We soon learned that our next door neighbor, Jaralyn, was bat-shit crazy. She had a HUGE crush on my Dad. She would make up excuses to talk to him, She flirted with him shamelessly. The whole neighborhood thought it was hilarious. My Mom used to try to rescue my Dad whenever she noticed Jaralyn trying to corner my Dad while he was out doing yard work. Jaralyn would just give my Mom dirty looks and the cold shoulder before muttering obscenities under her breath and slinking back into her house to play with her dogs.

Oh, god! I felt horrible for her dogs. I'm not sure exactly how many she had, but it was at least 4. Jaralyn treated them like babies. Literally. She would constantly have one of them swaddled in her arms, talking to it. I remember seeing her try to feed a few of them from baby bottles. When she put the dogs outside (in her fenced in yard), she would put them in playpens. Not fenced in dog runs, but honest to goodness playpens meant for human infants. She also always had at least one of her dogs on her lap while driving.

All the neighborhood kids were scared of Jaralyn. She would scream at us from her front door whenever we would walk past her house on the sidewalk. She was also one of those people who left her Christmas lights up on her house and outside trees year-round. One Summer, my friends and I made a game of sneaking into her yard and unscrewing and stealing the colored bulbs from her strands of Christmas lights in her trees. I never did get caught.

Okay, so maybe Jaralyn wasn't completely bat-shit crazy, but she definitely wasn't all there. She certainly made our life on Amana Ct. a little bit more interesting, though. I don't know what happened to Jaralyn, but I do wonder about her every now and then. She was still there when we moved away, but she wasn't still on Amana Ct. a few years later when we moved back.