More on the neighborhood - neighbor fun

Our second "neighbor meeting" happened when my son was about two and a half months old. I'd like to just talk about general lifestyle issues before talking about this meeting. When we bought the house, we hired a painter to repaint the entire house. I went to the paint store to choose paint but I was 8 months pregnant and couldn't stand, so I chose Navaho White. For the entire house. This means that we lived in something approximating a 45-year old mental hospital for the first three years. We actually live down the street a few miles from where "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" was conceived, so it was kind of thematic. But oh my goodness. Navaho White is a scourge upon humanity. I finally gave it up and painted the house some nice colors, although not before going through the "massive rip-off with tacky color consultants 101" exercise. I still have three gallons of really ugly paint *and* the nicely-printed and framed "color presentation" from this consultant sitting around somewhere. The nice thing is that all of the colors complimented one another (wheee!) The bad thing is that they were, um, well I'm sorry, but the unpolitically correct term "butt ugly" springs into my mind. OK, let's move on from visions of suburban housewives in straitjackets (but with perfect blonde pageboys, oh my!), and talk about our second visit. The second visit, was actually the first visit we had. I'm sorry to say that it kind of scared us. We weren't very groomed (to put it nicely), and had had very little sleep. Ah. Also, when the painter came, we'd blithely told him to just remove all of the lights and we'd replace them, but it was the year 2000 and nobody was around to hire, so we had just gone to Home Depot and bought a bunch of those freestanding lights, which were scattered around a cavernous house, littered with boxes. We looked a little like a dorm room At any rate, the doorbell rang and we looked through the cut-glass front door (white), installed by the previous owner, a little old lady who loved orange and yellow. It was a family, arranged in perfect order in front of our door. I opened the door, suspiciously clutching my child. "Um Hello?" I said. I hate to admit it, but I am not a fan of the Watchtower and dislike the Christian custom of recruiting by ringing on doorbells. "Hello!" said the woman, her smile faltering a bit as she looked at us. "Welcome to the neighborhood." "Ah," I said. There was no way I could let these people into my house. They looked like they should be playing tennis and my home would scare them. Her husband stood right beside her, nicely, and two sullen children stared at me. "Um, thank you!" I said, in a sub-par social fashion. The children stared. "We saw you moving in," said the woman. (I was wondering. "Do they live here? Were they selling things down the street that day?") "I'm Marcie and this is Jim. Here are Billy and Suzy (fake names)" "Hi," I said weakly, and we introduced ourselves, standing in our doorway like unfriendly folk. “Um, we just moved in,” I said. “The house is a mess. I’m so very sorry…” "Oh, that’s fine. We just wanted to say hello. What church do you belong to?" said the woman, smiling nicely. And all of my alarms went off. Oh my goodness. “None,” I said. The nice conversation lasted for two more minutes and then they left. They haven’t really spoken with us since, although we get an occasional hello from them.