The people, the noise, the visual clutter.
We live on the top floor of our apartment building, yet it sounds like we have upstairs neighbours.
And they are noisy af.
So much for me being happy that we’d be rid of upstairs neighbours when we moved.
Some nights they like to play folk tunes on the accordion (badly).
Some nights a few other unidentified instruments join in to create a genuine cacophony.
And for some reason this always has to happen at the exact time when I’m trying to put my kid to bed.
We also have families with teenagers in the building.
You know what that means?
Door slamming.
And lots of it.
Then there’s the younger child who’s bedtime routine always involves throwing a 90-minute hissy fit, which sounds like a banshee as the sound travels through the house.
And that’s not even mentioning the neighbour that comes home at around 10 pm, drives into her parking spot (which is right under our window), and makes full use of the speakers in her car.
She likes hip hop and metal.
And she’s not the only one of our neighbours who likes to come home and sit in the car.
Many a time have I happened to glance out the window late at night, usually because my hand lotion sits by the window and it’s the last pit stop I make before going to bed, and seen this or that neighbour sitting in the car, scrolling on the phone.
Sometimes for a few hours!
Then there’s that one kid who likes to bang on the pipes, making that lovely metallic clang that travels through the whole building.
That bugger likes to make music like that until an adult comes to pull him away with a lot of angry shouting.
Our building is also full of dogs.
There’s the Sheepadoodle, whose owner doesn’t like to make eye contact and doesn’t like to shorten her leash when she sees or hears other people in the stairs.
There’s the big black dog that the owner has little control over.
There’s the territorial pit or staffie that lives on the first floor behind the door everyone has to pass by to use the stairs.
That’s the house with more kids than I can count, and a lot of them like to hang out at the bottom of the stairs, scrolling TikTok on their phones.
I’ve seen and heard their mother nag them to not do that.
And they don’t like to make space when you need to use the stares, hunching as close to the wall as they can and giving you a sullen glare for interrupting their short-form content sessions.
When their phones start to run out of battery, they go home to grab the chargers, and come up to the top floor to sit by the electrical socket.
There’s the big’n’small duo from the Russian or some kind of Eastern European family that we usually run into while putting the daughter’s skates on at the bottom of the stairs.
The little dog is very shy, doesn’t like to interact with strangers.
The bigger one is a beautiful solid blue grey colour with blue eyes. It decided, after meeting me once, that I was the perfect candidate to demand scritches from, so she stops by me every time now and refuses to move for the longest time.
And then there are a bunch of others I’ve only heard barking from behind closed doors or have seen from afar.
All this to say, there’s a lot of barking.
Now, while I generally love dogs, when you’ve got a poorly trained dog that is also very vocal, it gets tiring when you leave your dog at home alone for the whole day without first training them for the separation.
And then there are the bottom-floor neighbours who’ve got a trampoline in their yard.
They’re right below us and instead of a balcony, they have a little yard with a patio.
And they’ve put a huge trampoline on their patio.
Except for that they’ve put the trampoline right underneath where the drain pipes from the balconies above them are.
I found this out when I was washing off the bird poo from our balcony last autumn when we moved in.
It was old and stale and hard to scrub out.
I tried to use as little water as possible, but some still got away.
And when the downstairs neighbours got angry, that’s when I realised that they had a trampoline. Right under our drain pipe.
The balcony below us is glazed, so there’s no issue from there.
But I’ve had glazing put into two apartments in the last 6 years and I really didn’t want to sit through that again.
Or pay for it in an apartment that we don’t own.
We’re not avid balcony sitters anyway, it’s just an extra large airing window in the summer.
So, our balcony is open to the elements.
That means that all the trees we have around here lose their leaves and the wind blows them onto our balcony.
Since it got cold, we haven’t even used the balcony, so I didn’t notice that the leaves had packed into the drain pipe.
Not until we got hit by a three-day storm.
I glanced out one day and noticed that instead of a balcony, we had a swimming pool.
I put on my wellies and went to investigate, finding that the pipe blockage was preventing it from draining.
So, I uncorked it, unceremoniously tossing the soggy mess of leaves and twigs and pine needles over the side into the woods, and it started to drain (and took about 2 hours to drain completely!)
Right into the downstairs neighbours’ trampoline.
But there’s nothing I can do about that; it’s either your (weatherproof) trampoline or I get fined for damaging the property because I neglected to care for it.
The last time a little water came out of our drain pipe, the neighbours put a bucket on the trampoline to catch the water and brought out a window spray and some paper towels to wipe it down.
Then they left the paper towels and window spray bottle on the trampoline for three days.
I haven’t had the courage to peek down and see what the situation is now.
But I also don’t understand how they decided that was a good place for it.
And I don’t understand why they get upset about rainwater from our drain pipe, when their trampoline is out in the open, gets rained on regularly, and is constantly full of leaves and twigs that they don’t care to brush off.
My mother extols the virtues of living in the city all the time.
It’s convenient, it’s easy, you don’t have to plough your own yard (but we do still have to dig the car out of the snow in winter ourselves), and so on and so on.
She grew up in the country and still reminisces about things like getting a week off school in autumn to help with the potato harvest. (We still get that week off from schools, but no kids go to help in the harvests any more, instead lots of families go on holiday abroad.)
But even so, I’ve always felt more at home in the countryside.
Because in the city, it gets hard to breathe.
I often don’t realise how overstimulated I am on a daily basis until we take a day trip out into the countryside and I marvel at the calmness.
I marvel at how clearly I can think.
I marvel at how easy it is to breathe.
Out there, I feel at peace.
In here, it’s like being in one of those cartoon sarcophagi that’s all needles on the inside, constantly poked and prodded by some kind of stimulus.
While I totally see how it’s convenient to live here, this isn’t where I want to stay.
I spent a lot of time growing up at the stables, in the country, on farms and at summer houses.
That’s where I feel at home.
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