The house next door was an eyesore.  The truck that just pulled up in front of it was worse. 

            I set my pen down.  Grading was always a miserable task, worse for summer classes.  A distraction was not unwelcome.  I leaned forward in my chair to get a better look through the front dining room window. 

            The sold sign had appeared last week, so when I was home I had been watching for the new owner.  Maybe things would get better.  They couldn’t get much worse. 

The house had always been an aggravation.  It had been rental property since I moved in four years before.  That had been bad enough — loud music until all hours, occasional fights among the six undergrads who lived there and/or their various, often-changing girlfriends, the decrepit cars filling the parking spots in front of my house as well as theirs, the fraying couch on the front porch, the mountains of garbage on the back porch.  Then the landlord had stopped paying the mortgage and the bank foreclosed. 

The empty property had proven more noisome than the rented one.  Nobody had broken in yet but scarcely a week went by in which I didn’t have to call 911 about loiterers on the porches or in the small backyard.  The grass was never mowed — I had to hand it to the departed undergrads, they had usually kept that part under control.  The garbage situation had decidedly not gotten better, piling up not just on the back porch and billowing through the yard, but now even the narrow walkway between the empty house and mine was cluttered with litter. 

The truck that had just parked out front made the rundown house look like a Marriott.  A Ford pickup, thirty years old if it was a day, painted a gray that was definitely not its original color.  Except the tailgate, which was a green so dark it was almost black, and the passenger door, which was black.  The sides and wheels were unevenly plastered with Olympic quality grunge almost the same color as the truck’s primary shade, giving the vehicle a gravel-like texture.  The back was filled with overflowing boxes and buckets, one little ladder and one big ladder poking out amongst the rubble.  Big bungee cords stretched over the whole mess to theoretically keep it from flying out, although a blue tarp had clearly been making escape plans during the trip.    

The driver’s side door opened.