My neighborhood

I live in the silicon valley, in a lovely neighborhood where the minimum plot size is 1 acre, and the houses cost (use special voice please) "billuns and billuns of dollars." Well, okay, they don't cost that much. But when I was a child, living in the California foothills durin the seventies, I remember driving through the local "big town" (an armpit, sorry to say), and hearing my mother say "these houses cost 100,000 dollars!" Wow. They seemed so big to me. And a hundred thousand dollars! It seemed like so much money! Of course now, thirty-three years later, values are different. A garage costs a half million dollars, right? But my inner voice still will occasionally think "a hundred thousand dollars!" The people right behind us (VC types) are building a monstrous extravaganza of a house, which is the new trend in houses in our neighborhood. Years ago, when Microsoft was trying to recruit my husband, we got a house tour of the Seattle area and heard houses like this referred to as McMansions. Yup. Like, 7,000 square feet for a family of four. Of course all of these houses are on one-acre plots, so they look pretty ridiculous, but still -- they mean success! It's not really happening for us here. For one thing, the people who used to populate the neighborhood (excuse me for generalizing when I call them "old rich white guys") are really not very friendly. In the first two years of living here, THREE of our neighbors spoke with us. The first family is a woman whom, I'm sorry to say I refer to with the unabashedly non-politically correct nickname of "menopausal neighbor," living across the street who showed up on our doorstep one day, embarrassed husband in tow. We answered the door disheveled (we moved at 8 months pregnant and my son was 2 months), and chose not to invite them in. Good choice, since she probably would have tried to set fire to the wood paneling. "Do you have a cat named Dumpster?" she asked (Hey, what can I say. He was raised in the city. We considered piercings.) "Um, yes," we answered blearily. "What did he do?" "We have a bird sanctuary in back of our house," she snarled. "And he is killing the birds!" If you're up all night nursing, you don't have razor quick intellect. I thought for a few minutes and was incredibly tempted to say "why are you feeding them on the ground?" but decided against it. And she had a point. Dumpster was a great bird lover. Instead I said "um, is there something that I should do about that?" "Keep him on your property!" she spat. We nodded soberly, closing the door while we clutched the baby. Hey! Welcome to the neighborhood! Incidentally, did I mention that the damn real estate doubled in price the year before we bought and that our house was a total fixer upper with flocked dining room wall coverings? ) So. Pay millions of dollars for an acre (and be told that you have to, what? Put an electrode on your cat's collar so that he doesn't harm the neighbor's bird sanctuary?) We actually found ourselves on the town website, anxiously looking up the "rules," to see what they were and what would happen to us if we didn't follow them. Hoo boy. I was raised on a farm, lived as a child in the California mountains (hippieland, as I called it), and have spent a lot of time living in Palo Alto, and on Portrero Hill in San Francisco, where it's a shock to meet a heterosexual. But the wierdest place I have ever lived in my life is the upper middle class suburbs. Incidentally, our cat disappeared three months later, after we received a threatening letter from her. Nice, huh?