First Impressions

Closing day was exciting and stressful. I vacillated between a feeling of eagerness to finally own my own home and a sense of impending doom that, as a single woman who knew nothing about owning a home, I was embarking on the road to emotional and financial ruin for a second time in my lifetime.

After an hour of signing and initialling documents, I accepted a fistful of keys and a stack of appliance owners' manuals from the sellers, a basket of pansies from my real estate agent and drove to pick up Nelson, my three-year-old Airedale, to introduce him to our new home. I had a split of champagne I'd been saving for a special occasion stashed in the back corner of my fridge. It had been a gift to ring in the new millennium but, at the time, that didn't seem like something worth wasting a good bottle of bubbly over. Closing on my own house was definitely a cork-popping occasion. After clawing my way out of a car repo, a foreclosure, tons of credit card debt and the emotional trauma of an abusive marriage that didn't end well, I had achieved the American Dream of owning a home - a home of my own.

The house key with a laminated yellow fob displaying the name of the previous owners in black magic marker slid smoothly into the lock and Nelson and I entered through the kitchen door of our new home. I opened the champagne and filled a flute I had brought with us for the occasion. I unpacked some cheese and crackers that I shared with Nelson as I sipped the champagne and walked around the house. I enjoyed the second glass from the contented comfort of my new front-porch swing. I thumbed through the stack of owners' manuals I received at the closing. I was delighted to see that the stack of booklets included an area survey map with neighbors' names written in the appropriate lots and there was an old photo of the house taken in 1908.

After pouring the remainder of the champagne into my glass, I decided it was time to introduce Nelson to his new backyard. I opened the sliding glass door that leads to the back patio in time to see an older man, hunched over, scrambling along the fence and headed away from the house. I immediately deducted that it was my next door neighbor. I am going to go on record here as saying that it was the champagne that encouraged me to wave my arm in the air and shout, "yoo hoo! Are you my new neighbor? I'm Bonnie and I just bought this house!" He raised an arm behind his back without looking away from his task.

In the same instant that I realized he was chasing after a chicken, Nelson was gone like a shot and pouncing in a play posture between the man and his Rhode Island Red. The man let out a panicked moan. "It's okay," I hooted, "he won't hurt your chicken." What a stupid thing to say ... again, the champagne. I didn't know what Nelson would do with a running, wing-flapping hen on the loose. Fortunately for me, Nelson responded to my recall and the man, whose face I never did see, disappeared behind the stockade fence at the end of my property line.



Although a crisis was averted, I still felt like maybe we hadn't made a great first impression on our new next door neighbor.