First of all, WE LIVE HERE! Content about actual projects in our actual home to come soon. Also, Indigo will write some posts soon. I have that on good authority because I have been demanding it and I make the coffee around here, so I hold some cards.

So last week we had the new bamboo floors put in on the main level! More on that soon — you know… from Indigo. (ahem) While I was here with the flooring crew, I noticed some weeds springing up in the side yard between our fence and the road. Well, I wasn’t actually sure yet that we owned that section of land, but with the weeds coming up, I figured it must be our responsibility, so I texted our friend’s lawn guy, who also lives in the complex. Easy enough!

Not so much.

The next day, while in an all-day meeting at work, I discovered the following:

• someone had called the city to complain that we had weeds
• they had gotten the number wrong and now our new next door neighbor was spending her morning trying to get a code violation removed from her house
• there is such a thing as a code violation about weedy lawns in this city
• we were in breach of it
• everyone in our community knew all about it
• our next door neighbor is very nice
• our neighbor who does yard maintenance is also very nice
• (I learned this part last) yes, that’s actually a part of our yard

I felt pretty embarrassed and ashamed about this whole thing. And then indignant. And unwelcome. All of it reminded me about how easy I usually have it as a white person moving into a neighborhood that I can expect to be welcoming.

In the City of Atlanta, where I have lived for over a decade, it’s not uncommon to see homes in varying conditions right next to each other as neighborhoods gentrify rapidly. In fact, moving to an “up and coming” neighborhood and demanding that the homes right next to each other all look the same, or be kept up to the same aesthetic standards, could be a sign of misplaced entitlement. We wanted to live here, in part, because we were less worried we would be a part of a wave of displacement in a historic neighborhood built by people of color. We didn’t feel comfortable being a part of a real estate development-driven shift like that until we knew how to engage with our responsibility as newcomers.

Of course, none of that is necessarily what happened here. We were the ones moving in, for starters, and it was also probably just an honest mistake or the kind of misplaced zeal for rules and regulations that exists in any collection of people. But it did remind me that we moved into a community that, while delightful and very down to Earth, may also contain some folx who want their little boxes on the hillside made of tickytacky, and I’m going to need to square that.

So anyway, welcome to the neighborhood! We’re unapologetically queer and weird, we’re 100% here to disrupt your comfort with the shameful Southern legacy of institutional racism, and we’re definitely coming for your heteropatriarchy, but yeah, we’ll pay J. to mow the lawn from now on.