Welcome to My Wysteria Lane

I have further proof today that I am, in fact, living on the "Wysteria Lane" of my neighborhood. Case in point, peruse this list of what has happened in our section of the neighborhood since we moved in just more than five years ago. (I may have blogged on this before, but the list has grown since then!)

1. May I Borrow A Cup of...uh, nevermind? There were drug dealers living just a few streets back from mine. My husband and I had hedged bets that a Houston Rocket or Texan player lived there because we only saw very young people in flashy cars pulling up, and never any adults. The people had tons of money put into ironwork all around the house and landscaping right upon move-in. They drove cars you really only dream about having. No one ever saw them, but they had tons of visitors daily. They vacated when they felt "the heat"coming down on them.

2. The Hiding of Young Lay. The only son of Ken Lay, Enron's CEO, moved in down the street from me with his wife and son in the midst of the Enron scandal. I was the one who finally put two-and-two together and figured this out when I was invited to a scrapbooking crop night by his wife. She just about bought out the store, made references to her poor in-laws and how unfairly they were being treated, and so on. They kept to themselves and lived here about a year, after which they moved back "in the loop" to their old money roots. I joked with my neighbors that they were slumming in what I consider to be the nicest neighborhood in which I will ever live.

3. Tragedy Right Across the Street. A new neighbor, whom we had just met, hemorrhaged to death when a beam he was standing on in his attic gave way and he fell to the entryway floor below. We were the only people to have met him. He had moved in just two weeks before this happened. He was a single guy in his 40s who loved flashy cars and traveled a lot for work. We started to wonder what had happened to him when we stopped seeing him right around September 11th. My husband and I scanned the list of Sept. 11 plane passengers, hoping he wasn't on there. Apparently, his girlfriend found him a few days later and the ambulance came late at night with no sirens. There were weeks of speculation about what was going on when we'd see investigators at his house, and his motorcycles and cars towed away.

4. Severing a Connection. A home construction worker had to be careflighted by helicopter out of our cul-de-sac one weekend when he accidentally severed his leg.

5. Death Surrounds Us. The family who lived behind me had a lot of trouble before tragedy struck their home. Their teen son had used pellet guns to shoot out some lights on our house, drove his truck in the neighborhood ditches and stayed in trouble with the homeowner's association. Sadly, he was killed when he fell from the back of his truck when he was goofing around with some of his friends. He hit his head on the street and was rushed to the hospital and never regained consciousness. But, this is not the end of that story. Months later, his father was unable handle the loss of his only son and shot himself to death in front of the mother in their house, which happens to be DIRECTLY behind ours.

6. Scam-a-rama. I just found out that around the corner from my house, our newest neighbors were busted and arrested last weekend. Apparently, they were scam-artists running a fake shutter/wood blinds business out of their home. Police surrounded their home and arrested them. The irony in this is that they moved next door to a couple who actually work for the FBI. This means, the mother of this busted family probably sat at the bus stop talking to the FBI-agent mother each day, all the while running these scams.

Add to this your standard neighborhood scandals, like divorces, bickerings among neighbors, wild parties thrown and the stories that come from those, and we've always got excitement around us. Honestly, at this point we just have to laugh about it all. But, it does make us wonder. We moved into what we considered an upscale, very nice suburban neighborhood with all the amenities.

When people joke about shows like Desperate Housewives and question how so much scandal and crime could really go on in one small neighborhood, I just have to smile. Short of dead bodies in the trunks of cars, we've got our share of soap opera drama going on right outside our front door every day.