I purposely didn’t take a picture of what I saw when we went for our family walk the other night but a sign I saw cracked me up.  Apparently his lawn has been the target of animals who evacuate their larger-than-normal bowels on the grass.  There was a sign labelled “Please keep your HORSE off my lawn”.  What made it amusing was he took the time, in front of the sign, to place one of these Herculean-sized dog dumps on top of a paper towel in order to highlight size and color of the offending organic material.

It got me to thinking of, at least most of the neighborhoods I’ve been in down here; people don’t socialize with each other.  You’re lucky if you get a barely perceptible acknowledgement nod.  It’s not just an Atlanta thing.  With the exception of the last place we lived in while in Chicago, every other place I lived people just didn’t acknowledge each other.  Part of that is you really don’t want to interact with most people in a large city for safety’s sake.  Apartments and high rises, while cooping people up together, seem to be the most segregated areas in terms of human interaction.  When we moved to a 3-story-house style neighborhood in Chicago (Diversey Pkwy, between Southport and Ashland), we wound up knowing most of the neighbors.  Then we moved to Atlanta and, with a few exceptions, have barely conversed with our neighbors in any of the 3 houses we’ve been in and that includes two subdivisions full of families.

There obviously is a fine line you’d like to not cross in terms of being in a neighborhood where people snoop and gossip on each other but a happy medium would be nice to encounter.  I do miss our neighbors on Diversey who, the evening before we headed out on our honeymoon (almost 10 years go), decorated the backyard sidewalk with well wishes outlined with chalk.  While we rarely talk to our neighbors here, I guess maybe that’s preferable to a Desperate Housewives Wisteria Lane kind of situation.  Then again, its also disconcerting to not even make eye contact with the president of your neighbourhood association and his wife as we passed each other on the street.  It’s kind of hard to miss our family of four with a 5 year old on a bike and a 1 year old in her stroller.  Whatever.  It will just make the move back up north easier without any emotional ties down here.