If Your Neighbor Eats His Parents in the Forest and Nobody Sees Him, Are They Still Food?

We have a next door neighbor.

It took us almost a year to notice the aforementioned next door neighbor, because his house is entirely grown up in weeds and it just sort of blended into the woods on that side. Not just tall-grass-weeds. but the kind of weeds that have a several year head start, and now has thistles as high as your head, and maple trees spontaneously springing forth every two feet or so.

As a dedicated anarchist, I totally support the right of anyone to live any way they like. However, last winter when the leaves fell off the trees and we noticed that there was a house a few hundred yards away, it was sort of a surprise. At the time, we thought it was abandoned...it's in terrible shape. It appears that any repairs that have been done at all have been done with scraps of plywood or 2x4s and left, mismatched and unpainted, to warp in the sun and rain.

So my next guess was that this was the house of some elderly person who couldn't afford to pay someone to take care of it. That's pretty common here; old folks try to stay independent as long as possible, but they have more and more trouble with big maintenance projects and things start falling apart unless there's an adult child to help.

But no. No elderly person.

Since I first noticed that house over there, I've been sort of fascinated by it. It used to be a nice house. There's a big porch in front that would be excellent for porch-sitting if it were repaired, a nice big yard, a couple of outbuildings, and a garage. Now that I'm paying attention, I see a fairly young man, maybe 40-ish, dressed professionally and driving an SUV, going up and down the unbelievably overgrown and rutted gravel driveway and parking in front of the falling-down garage every day.

So what the hell? He's not old, he's not disabled, and he's not even very busy. He seems to work something like banker's hours. Why not cut your grass and fix your porch before it falls off?

Unless this is one of those horror movie scenarios where he's got his dead parents in the house and he's eating them for supper every night after he comes home from work in his Dockers and his SUV and he let the weeds grow because he doesn't want the house to be noticed because that might remind people that no one has seen the parents in 10 or 15 years.

I'm just sayin'.

Or he's just REALLY lazy.

But for the last few days, the electric company, CIPS, has been cleaning up his yard for him. They've been cutting down all the trees that have sprung up under the power lines, and now his sordid life with his dead parents is about to be exposed to the world. Or at least to us.

I'd love to Gladys Kravitz him and go look through the windows and see if the house is really a dungeon and find out if he tortured his parents for years before killing and eating them, but that seems rude. Maybe I can get Lori to do it.