The trouble was, it was getting harder and harder to get to the front door. Forget it at night, unless you had a good light. There was a trail, sort of, if you could figure it out. Then there were the automotive parts and tools to step over. Lord knows what kinds of reptiles or insects lived in that stuff.
Delba didn’t seem to mind or even care if every square inch of yard was filled with old cars, trucks, campers, and pieces of said objects. In fact, she seemed to delight in it!
But old Miss Jinny next door, was highly annoyed by this array of semi-useful mechanical devices. She kept her yard meticulously manicured and clean. Not even a pine cone disrupted the picture perfect lawn. Unfortunately, in addition to Deba’s collection of automotive pieces, she also kept dogs and chickens. Lots of them.
As is the custom with canines, they never relieved themselves in their own yard. And Miss Jinny’s yard offered wide open spaces filled with soft grass. There was even a small fish pond to drink from. This not only added to Miss Jinny’s annoyance, it seemed likely to drive her crazy. She kept small shovels by each door, so that when she went out to weed the flower beds or pick up sticks and pine cones, she could also clean up those calling cards. These, she dumped rather angrily into Delba’s yard, taking care to litter the little trail to the front door most generously. But Delba never seemed to notice. She just stepped over the little piles and went on her way without a second glance.
So Miss Jinny decided to up her retaliations a bit more deviously. She planted piles all around Delba’s mailbox, so she was sure to step on one of them and mess up her silly purple house shoes. She watched from the window of the front room while Delba skipped happily through her yard decorations and dodged the messy spots with great expertise. Jinny frowned and even uttered a few cuss words when Delba retrieved her mail unflustered and unscathed by the evil trap.
One day, a man from the county came by with some sort of paper that said Delba had to clean up her yard and confine her myriad collection of dogs and birds. This only served to confuse her, as she considered her yard junk very valuable and possibly useful at some future time. So she got all dressed up and went down to the county office. “Now looka here!” she started.
“This yard seems to be in violation of certain rules,” explained the lady behind the desk. “I suggest that you hire someone to haul all that stuff off and put up a fence for your chickens,” she went on.
“Why would I haul it off? That’s a perfectly good Ford truck! It just needs a little work to get it running again! And that transmission is as clean as they get. Someone might need it.” She went on and on about each piece in the yard and finally had the lady convinced that all that junk was perfectly good stuff.
“I’ll tell my brother you got some tires that will fit his car and a drive shaft for that wreck he’s been working on for so long,” the lady said.
“And don’t forget - my free range chicken eggs are only fifty cent a dozen!” added Delba. And that was that.
Miss Jinny almost had a stroke when she found out Delba had outwitted the county, as she had been the one to lodge the complaint to begin with. She began to sit up at night and think of ways to get back at Delba. But everything she could come up with was either illegal or too risky. But the next morning, something happened that seemed to be the answer to her problem.
A couple of men in overalls came slowly down the road in a truck that was pulling a big trailer full of scrap metal.
She jumped up and waved them over, and began to point out the junk in Delba’s yard. “Bet you could get it all for a good price!” she suggested.
“Sure is a lot of stuff! It would take four loads to get it all!” The men commented unsurely.
“I’ll even throw in fifty bucks if you get her to agree to sell all of it!” Miss Jinny offered. That did it - there they went to bargain with Delba for her yard full of junk.
Sure enough, in a couple of days, all the stuff was gone and Delba had a pocket full of money. In fact, she had enough money to fence in her yard full of dogs and chickens, and keep Miss Jinny out. Delba was well aware of the pains Miss Jinny had gone to, to trick her into messing up her purple slippers. So there it was - peace in the neighborhood at last.
In fact, Miss Jinny cooked up some fresh oatmeal cookies to take over to Delba’s as a peace offering. She got there just in time to see Delba rolling a transmission out of the trunk of her car and into her yard. “Look what I found!” Delba hooted joyously. “And I’ve got a muffler and five tire rims in the back seat!” she added.
“Oh no!” muttered Miss Jinny, as she spotted the first dog to dig out from under Delba’s new fence.
