Corn for the doves (or, our neighbor's big secret).

Many of you who have read this blog before have heard mention of our rather-unfriendly neighbors across the hall.  It's a man and a woman and 1.5 children (I say 1.5 because I am only sure about one of them, a slightly-awkward teenage boy who parks his bike in front of our door.  Jack says there's also a little girl, but I've never seen her, so for now we'll count her as half).  I have griped many a time about the trash they leave all over the landing, the mysterious corn kernels scattered across the landing and on our doorstep, their enormous pile of wood that smells like pickles, and the general standoffish-ness I'd felt from them -- probably making many of you crazy with my complaints.

But in the last few months, we've been making progress!  After a particularly exasperating series of rotting watermelon rinds dripping down the stairs and boxes stacked next to our door, I finally worked up the courage to ask the man if he could store his, ahem, junk, somewhere else.  He was really nice about it, and moved it a few days later!  (He even asked me why I hadn't asked earlier... same thing Jack had been asking me for months...)  But anyway, it was a really nice step in the right direction, and I felt respected, even if things weren't particularly friendly.

Then they had a huge flood.  Our water gets turned off periodically, and apparently one day they had left a faucet open while the water was off, and then left the house.  By the time the neighbor on the ground floor saw the dripping, the water had been running for a LONG TIME -- we live on the fifth floor, and when I got home from work that evening, water was still running out the entrance to our building, and cascading down the stairs.  Our neighbors had dragged their enormous, sodden rug out to the landing between our apartments and left it hanging there for a few days, dripping steadily down to the floors below and making the entire stairway smell strongly of wet dog.  It was gross, but when he knocked on the door and asked if we minded, we said no -- what else could he do?  And at least he had the courtesy to ask.

So these steps had been taken, and I had been feeling optimistic, when suddenly a few days ago, we had a huge surprise.

We were coming home from work when we saw our neighbor on the landing with a giant sack full of corn and wheat.  Curious, Jack asked him what it was for.  "For the doves and pigeons," he replied, as he pulled out the ladder leading to the roof.  "I feed them. There are probably about 30 of them up there.  Some of them are all white; it's rare!"  It was the most I'd ever heard him say, and Jack and I looked at each other, astonished, as he climbed the ladder and disappeared above.  We waited until we got into our apartment to laugh at this astonishing turn of events, and then two minutes later we heard a knock on the door.  There stood our neighbor, a white dove clutched in both hands.  "Look, here are some of the white ones," he explained, holding the flapping birds out to us.  "I'm just about to go let them go from my window.  Or wait, do you want to let them go?"  He thrust the birds in our direction, and we hesitatingly grabbed them.  "Just go let them fly off your balcony," he said, and so we did -- rushing through the bedroom to the balcony as the doves squirmed in our hands, a blur of feathers and a gush of air as they flapped to freedom, leaving white feathers on the balcony and bedroom floor as proof they were there.  By the time we returned to the door, laughing and astonished, our neighbor was gone.