Butthead

Due to the vagaries of life, the guy who moved in next door to me is a butthead. I mean that in the crabbiest form of the word. One of the prizewinning things he did was to whack a bunch of greenery he thought was weeds. He had no idea what was in there. I do. He thought I would thank him. Grrr.

I won't even call him by his name. I call him Mr. Butthead.

I could overlook the weed-whacking as a misbegotten good deed, but when he took my largish (think the size of a breadbox) landscape rocks that I brought home in an overloaded Dodge Colt from Sioux Falls, that was just theft. Sucker wasn't getting away with taking my rocks. Each time he took one, I left him a note and then he gave it back.

He gave them back. But he took them in the first place.

I'll add to his sins that he has butchered a screen of trees that slowed down the dust from the county road on the other side of him. It's hard to put your clothes on the line when the dust coats them.

So I plan on moving plants I value away from his whacking, chain-sawing ways. I have a clump of goldenrod, and a rhubarb plant that are both moving. Probably the horseradish, too, even though it has probably lived there for 60 or 80 years.

Because one of my living room windows opens out onto his barren-scape of a yard, I also plan on putting in a strip of sunflowers and shorter plants in a 1-foot by 70-foot strip between he and I.

Jerk.