My new neighbor treated my lawn like her private parking lot and laughed whenever I complained. I thought she was simply rude.<\/p>\n
I was wrong.<\/p>\n
After my husband died, my garden became my peaceful place. So when Audrey\u2019s party guests repeatedly drove across my grass, crushed flowers, and blocked my driveway, I asked her several times to stop.<\/p>\n
She mocked me instead.<\/p>\n
Eventually, I fought back. First, I turned on the sprinklers while her guests\u2019 cars were parked on my lawn. Later, after she proudly repainted her porch bright white, I scattered extra birdseed near the fence.<\/p>\n
The birds did exactly what birds do.<\/p>\n
Audrey stormed over furious.<\/p>\n
But during our argument, she suddenly said, \u201cYou really don\u2019t remember me?\u201d<\/p>\n
Then she mentioned a regional sports competition fifteen years earlier.<\/p>\n
Everything came back.<\/p>\n
I had been a judge. Audrey was seventeen, a promising athlete, and I had disqualified her for a technical violation. The ruling was correct\u2014but afterward, when she begged me to reconsider, I dismissed her cruelly.<\/p>\n
She had remembered me all these years.<\/p>\n
Moving next door had reopened that wound, and irritating me became her revenge.<\/p>\n
I apologized for how I had treated her back then.<\/p>\n
She admitted damaging my garden hadn\u2019t made her feel better either.<\/p>\n
Looking at her ruined porch and my crushed flowers, I smiled.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe both made a mess.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the first time, Audrey smiled too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My new neighbor treated my lawn like her private parking lot and laughed whenever I complained. I thought she was simply rude. I was wrong. After my husband died, my garden became my peaceful place. So when Audrey\u2019s party guests repeatedly drove across my grass, crushed flowers, and blocked my driveway, I asked her several …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10093,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10094,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10092\/revisions\/10094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}