Stitchpop

Take a look to the left and you'll notice I've cleaned up the links. No more broken or inactive blogs over there! Nothing but good, solid blogginess. In fact, I highly recommend you take a moment right now to go discover someone new. It's like making a new friend!

Just when you think your neighborhood is settled and you have a good sense of who is cheating on their spouses with whom, someone has to go and put their house up for sale.

The house across the street from us seems to have sprouted a "for sale" sign overnight. I swear it wasn't there yesterday. They must have snuck out under the cover of darkness and planted it so no one could get an early jump on the gossip.

This is really only interesting because it's one of the Swingers' houses. This particular couple and the couple next door to them always seemed to have an unnaturally neighborly relationship. In a subdivision where people raked leaves side by side without more than a cordial nod in each others' direction, where a friendly wave satisfied the month's requirement for casually exchanged greetings... (let's just say we're not the lean-over-the-fence-and-chat sort of neighborhood)... these neighbors raked each others' lawns, strung Christmas lights on each others' houses, distributed Halloween candy from the same bowl, pulled each others' kids in wagons, etc., etc., etc. It was sickening bordering on incestuous.

But they seemed to be happy in a way that we envied. The husbands would stand outside drinking beer together while their comparably aged children played and their wives smiled and talked on the porch swing. I'll admit it. We wanted what they had. We wanted a couple next door who liked the same music we liked and who didn't give a crap about what teams were playing in the next televised sporting event.

So how best to cope with our jealousy? We decided they not only traded meatloaf recipes and babysitting, but sexual favors and spouses. Because that shit is funny.

Then we imagined that things went sour between them. Maybe one of the wives was a tiny bit hotter in the sack, and the other one wanted to call off the extracurriculars. The tension! The fury! The inevitable discomfort of living in such close proximity to temptation and sin!

And now one of the houses is suddenly up for sale. Interesting...