We have our very own neighborhood Karen who often thrills us with her unwanted interferences, but not for much longer. From calling the police on neighborhood kids for setting up a lemonade stand to putting notes on everyone's doors telling us that we “need” to seek her approval before having a garage/yardsale at our own homes because she doesn’t like a lot of cars parked on “her street” as they upset her dog and scare her children, or telling everyone to not allow their children to ride their bikes past her house, and trying to dictate what color Christmas lights we should put up, it has been never-ending entertainment. Usually, I laugh and ignore her, but in late spring, she forced me to engage. At the time the coronavirus was nowhere in our area, and we didn’t think it would ever be a concern here in our part of the country, boy, were we mistaken. But then we were living like it didn’t exist.
The family directly across from me are Hispanic and are some of the nicest most thoughtful people that I have ever met. They have a son who is 10 years old now and for the last few years, he has helped many of us and our elderly neighbors with chores around our houses, and he never asks for any money. Of course, many of us give him money anyway, but if you know him you know he doesn’t do these things for money. He does it because it makes him feel good to help people. He told me one time that he likes to help people and make them smile.
On snow days when school was canceled, he would get up early and shovel snow off of sidewalks and driveways of our elderly neighbors before anyone had asked him to do it. If he saw that you had a lot of groceries, he would run over and jump right in helping, he would pull weeds and rake leaves, anything he could do to help. This family has a beautiful pear tree in their front yard and every year he bags up the pears and distributes them to all of us. I have talked about this good-hearted young man in another answer. His family has lived in the neighborhood for many years, even before our dear Karen moved in and tried to take over. It seems like she has always had something against this boy. Another mean old man and woman in our neighborhood also don’t like him because of his ethnicity and have tried to cause him trouble before.
Anyway, he and a couple of other neighborhood kids set up a lemonade stand in his front yard with the goal of raising money to donate to the local children's hospital in the next town over that had recently treated one of their friends from school for injuries from a farm accident. They had a nice stand set up that his father helped them build, and a large painted sign saying that they were collecting money for the children’s hospital. Our neighborhood is in a rural area, we have no sidewalks, but the road is wide with room to pull off and stop, many people ride by on their way to town and back. They were doing a good amount of business at their lemonade stand.
Well, Karen decided that he and his friends were intending to keep the money and not donate it at all. So she called the Sheriff's office and accused these children of defrauding a charity. Not to be outdone by a regular Karen, our Karen also called the local newspaper to announce this major fraud going on in our neighborhood. As I said we live in a small town so the newspaper actually sent someone out to see what was going on, but not before the police showed up.
When the deputies arrived a few of us noticed them right away as we do not see them much in our neighborhood. Karen also saw them arrive, and marched down her driveway holding her dog, a Yorkie that I swear had the same haircut as Karen, but it looked better on the dog, the dog was also more well behaved. Karen started yelling about how the kids were using the children’s hospital name to collect money to spend on themselves, and how they should all be arrested. Also, people were stopping in cars and parking “on her street” and scaring her dog, who at the time looked like he wanted to get down and play with the kids.
After her tirade, the deputy turned and asked the kids for their side of the story, and that is when Karen made her first fatal error. She screamed at the deputy, “I am the one who pays your salary. It’s your job to do as I say, not take the word of some border-jumping Mexicans.” She really hadn’t noticed that the deputy talking was himself Hispanic. I had a hard time not laughing out loud as the deputy started talking to my young neighbor in Spanish, The look on Karen's face was priceless. After talking with the young man, his friends, and his father, he was satisfied that they did indeed intend to donate the money.
But Karen was not to be denied her justice against these children who had committed this vile offense on “her street” and insisted that they didn’t have a permit to operate a business, and should be written a ticket and forced to close down; besides no one had asked her if it was okay to open a lemonade stand in “her neighborhood.” At that point, the deputies had had enough of Karen, and so had I. The deputy told her that outside of the city limits there was no law against having a roadside stand, no permit is needed. As long as your stand is on your property and far enough back from the road it’s legal. We have farmers with roadside fruit and vegetable stands all over this county. I don’t know where Karen was originally from, but it wasn’t around here.
It had been about 45 minutes to an hour since we had all been out in the street, and I asked Karen loud enough for everyone to hear, “Where are your children while you are out here in the street?” She snidely replied, “It’s really none of your business, but if you must know. my children are playing in my swimming pool in my back yard.” I said, “So, while you are out here bitching about someone else’s kids, you left two children under the age of 6 all alone in a swimming pool? Your little girl is around 3 years old and you left her and her brother who is around 5 alone in a swimming pool?”
That made both of the deputies take an immediate interest in Karen and she visibly shrank; it was like watching the air going out of a balloon. The lemonade stand was completely forgotten about and things shifted to Karen. One deputy told Karen that they needed to go to her house and make sure that her children were safe, and that is exactly what they did. After making sure that her children were indeed okay, the deputies came back and asked several of us if she often left her children alone like that. I wanted to say that she did, but I told the truth and said that I didn’t know, others said the same thing. The deputy said that they had no choice but to refer the case to child protective services. I don’t know what happened with that, but a ‘for sale’ sign went up in Karen’s front yard about three weeks later.
Because Karen had called the newspaper about this to make sure that everyone knew about her stopping this major criminal activity, there was a story about it in our local paper several days later making sure that her fame as an ultimate Karen was well known. They talked to several of my neighbors but I had no interest in talking to them. I guess they talked to the sheriff's office as well. Maybe that’s the reason for the “for sale” sign now in her yard. It is kind of unfair to her husband, who has always been nice and friendly. How he could put up with her is something I will never understand. I guess love can make you overlook many things. But you should never underestimate karma, it floats around, waiting for the right time to land, and when it does, it’s a bitch.
EDIT: Just to show how bad this woman was I tried to find the letter she left for everyone in the neighborhood regarding Christmas decorations so I could post it here, but I couldn’t find it. It was basically a list of everything that she found wrong with everyone's decorations being too old, lights that weren't spaced evenly or had bulbs not working, just trivial stuff that she didn’t like. She didn’t use any names but she mentioned a Nativity scene as being old and worn out and a disgrace to the neighborhood. It was in the yard of an elderly couple who had set it up every year for the last 40+ years, it was one of their Christmas traditions — that pissed a lot of people off. I do remember that she ended the letter telling us to look at her house as an example of the right way to decorate for Christmas. Nowhere in the letter did she wish anyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or anything, she simply signed her name. I will continue trying to find it, I know that I kept it. I know that I threw away the cease and desist letter she gave everyone about not having yard/garage sales because they upset her dog and kids. She also considered them low class.