We lived in our house for ten years, and not once did we see the blinds go up over at the place next door. We had an excellent view from our living room windows. Year after year we watched the blackberries grow and slowly overtake everything. As the roof valleys filled with debris and sprouted ferns, we wondered if it still kept the water out. During the warmer months, I’d ask our neighbor, K., if I could come over to his yard and trim the brambles in order to preserve the fence between our properties. He said yes each time, and eventually, after a few seasons, he told me that I didn’t need to ask anymore. He called me a good neighbor.

In the summer months, jazz would drift over our yards, and I felt grateful that I had a neighbor with such good taste in music. Once, with unremitting eye contact, he told me that he was descended from Cossacks, that his grandfather built his two neighboring houses, and his great uncle, our house. I asked if he had any old photographs of our house and he said he thought he did, and he would make sure to look for them in April; it was October, and in the same breath he told me about how he was going to China soon to open up a factory, but first he had to get around the mafia, and the other malignant forces conspiring against him.

After eleven years, I doubt that K. still thinks of me as a good neighbor. Instead of two houses to compose his kingdom, to ramble through his history, he is down to one. Soon it will be two years since we bought the house next door at a foreclosure auction. Now, the blackberries and ivy are almost reaching his back porch. Someday soon I’ll have to knock on his door and talk to him about cutting through the brush so we can build a new fence to keep the blackberries at bay.