When the feisty old lady across the street died one night, the only way I knew was that there were vehicles lining the sidewalk in front of her house that evening.

I only saw her a few times as a ghost-like figure standing inside her storm door. One time she put a smoke detector in her trash can without disconnecting the battery, and it beeped a shrill staccato like a thousand locusts! Jeff finally went over to smash out its deafening warning. The trashcan was full of rotten, black banana peels, but finicky as he can be, he still pounded it to pieces and silence. It wouldn't have bothered me.

This woman fed stray cats and placed bowls of black-eyed peas left over from the New Year’s Eve good luck fable all over my yard, plus she opened the crawl space screen to under my house for them and skunks to find refuge. She was a mixture of yin and yang, bad and good. Kind to animals and nurturing a love for Van Gogh's "Starry, Starry Night" painting. She played classical piano, yet she cursed like a sailor!

The front of her house sported two giant 1,000-watt bulbs in each globe light, or so it seemed to me. Once in a while, she would leave them on all night, and my bedroom glowed like Broadway, with a skeleton-like horizontal bar image on my bedroom wall from the metal slotted awnings outside my bay window.

This happened only once in a while. Now that she's gone, her long-lost daughter has moved in. She's left the blinding globe lights on several nights recently. I sent her a note, but they stayed on. I bought a sleeping mask, which was hard to find. Made in China, it sported a message reading, "Dreaming of First Class!" Is this their idea of a limp joke? All I dream of is a good night's sleep.

Another neighbor has a dog that barks all night – sometimes. It doesn't happen that often, but I looked in their window one night and saw a red-lighted terrarium with snakes. Forget that one. I watch "Fear Thy Neighbor" on the ID channel, and I know how that can end up.

Several years ago, I heard moaning from the top window of the same house all night. I went outside and yelled, "Are you being held against your will?!" And it stopped! You just never know.

Another newcomer drags 11 or more trash cans filled with yard waste, sticks and branches down his driveway to the public sidewalk two days before yard waste pickup day. He even borrows our trash cans without asking, and goes over to another neighbor's house and borrows hers because she has “gone to a home.” He used to tap his cans up and down on the sidewalk in a tympanic early morning chorus that woke me up. Finally, Jeff told him that this bothered me, and he stopped.

He walked up in front of our house one time, scowled at the dead leaves that had collected in a bed of ground cover, and then asked if he could rake them up. "Gee, thanks, go right ahead!" I said.

Now these newcomers on Atlantic Street have caused trouble by parking their cars on opposite sides of the roadway, forcing drivers to weave between them and cross the double yellow line, and filmed them doing so. They even called us rednecks! It has now stopped after the story was on local TV a few nights.

Well, I have a "684" prefix number on my land line phone, which means my family has been here since World War II. I'm a native Miltonian, a rarity these days. We were even here when sidewalks were provided by the town for residents. That has changed since the old days, and we have had to pay $5,000 to replace part of ours.

But on the positive side, my new neighbor with the two bright globe lights surprised me with newly installed, recessed lighting that points down on the front of her house. So let's give newcomers a chance to prove themselves; they might not be so bad after all!