MOLI VIEW™

It's official. Not only am I a nosy neighbor, but meddlesome too. I couldn't help myself. Everyday I take a stroll around the campus of the small liberal arts college near my house. This entails walking the three blocks from my house to campus first, usually an uneventful trip. I say "Hello" to neighbors, notice who's moving in and who's moving out. Recently the student renters in the corner house two blocks down graduated and a new group moved in. Legally, there shouldn't be student renters in our neighborhood since it's zoned for single-family homes, but who cares. I didn't, until the grass started growing past my knees and the garbage started piling up.
I pity the neighbors who live on this busy cross street. The traffic backs up at rush hour with commuters avoiding the interstate; they snack while they wait and throw their wrappers out the window. On top of that, the student renters have a bus stop on their property. There's a government-owned trash can right there, but it's not emptied often enough, so bottles and cans accumulate on the ground. It must be a drag to have to keep all this picked up. But somehow the other neighbors do it.
Then something strange started happening. In addition to the odd potato chip bag or Gatorade bottle at the curb, packaging from whole McDonald's meals began to sprout right in front of the students' house. This couldn't have been thrown from the street. The students had to be getting out of their cars and instead of carrying their trash 10 feet into the house, they were just dropping it, right there, on their own yard.
Like little flower pots, McDonald's bags dotted the yard and sat up on the stoop near the front door. All around the yard where the students parked their five cars, there were Molson beer bottles, some whole, some smashed to pieces; fruit juice cans, mostly flattened into thin discs; hundreds of pieces of candy wrappers and snack bags; and, oddly enough, two empty bottles of glue gel.
Some of the trash was hard to see, because the students had apparently decided they were not going to mow the whole lawn. The area where they park their cars was mowed and the strips on either side of the walkway to the front door — but all that grass on the side of the house near the street? What for? So in Florida's subtropical rain, the grass lining the sidewalk leading to campus grew and grew.
One afternoon I noticed two young men conversing on the front porch. They wore oversize designer sunglasses and chic asymmetrical haircuts. These metrosexuals are living like pigs? I wondered. I stopped to ask if they lived there. When one man said, "Yes, he does," I told him that I would be happy to help him clean the yard. The other man looked confused, so I said the same thing again in Spanish — there being a high likelihood around here that if English doesn't work, Spanish will. The first guy stopped me and said, "You can't talk to him in English. He doesn't speak English." Okay, so they don't speak Spanish either. I didn't get a chance to ask what they did speak, because the first guy had translated my complaint and the second was apologizing in English: "Sorry. Sorry. Okay. Okay."
I kept hoping, everyday that I walked by the next week, that something would change, but the McDonald's landscaping flourished and the grass grew above my knees.
Then last Saturday I noticed a crew hard at work on the lawn next door to the students' house. This is it, I determined. I'm taking care of this right now. I found the crew leader and asked how much it would cost for him to cut the students' lawn too. "Just the front yard," I told him. "I don't care about what's behind the fence." Forty dollars, a small price to pay for piece of mind.
I trotted home to get the cash, as well as a pair of gloves and a garbage bag. The recycling bin was too big to bring on my bike, so I decided to put the recyclables in my bike basket. I rang the bell to enlist the students to help, but no one answered. Four out of five cars were gone. So it was just me, stooping around. I filled up the garbage bag. I filled up my bike basket. I noticed that one of the McDonald's arrangements sprouting by the porch was really a Disney shopping bag filled halfway with trash. Somebody, at some point, had started to clean up, then lost interest. I filled that bag too.

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