Sugar Hill. Located about three miles to the West of 985, or, Lanier Parkway, (that’s what 85 splits into about 30 miles outside of the city.) this is probably considered one of the last suburban outposts before you get north of the lake, into “Banjo Territory.” (that’s what I call it anyway.)
My mother’s neighbors, a darling young thirty-something couple, has been paying me to house and dog sit for them for almost five years now. The last of these house-sitting ventures concluded about a month and a half ago; but it did not conclude without mishaps that, for some reason, occurred this time, as opposed to the last four-odd times I’ve stayed there.
Here is a invoice of the things that I owe my neighbors:
-One beach-themed plastic plate. (microwaved, when not microwave-safe. This is a very important loss to them, due to the fact that they eloped to the Bahamas about ten years ago, and their ENTIRE HOUSE is beach-themed. Shit.)
-One green, plastic colander. (microwaved, when not microwave-safe. During a drunken hunger-fest, I decided that the Pop Secret! Super Butter! would be too buttery, so I opened the package, rinsed all the pseudo-butter off, and threw it in the colander with a little salt and tucked that safely in a microwave; not even considering, of course, that all the salt fell right through the holes. I probably should have kept the result and called it ‘art’.)
-One Crate and Barrel Storage Table Unit. (gorgeous piece of furniture, and handy. It stores books, DVDS, remotes, and goes with just about anything. Unfortunately, it’s finish does not necessarily stand up to spilled nail polish remover. There is a much more interesting story behind this that I am simply too ashamed to share, but regardless: it was a gorgeous piece of furniture.)
- One wooden toilet seat. (no telling what exactly happened here. According to my boyfriend, it was whole one minute, and the next, it was split in half. This was also a crucial beach-themed ornament for their house. Or, at least, the top of the seat was, not the wooden, put-your-cheeks-here-part.)
Despite this poor couple’s multiple costs to their love nest, the female of the two recommended my dog/house sitting services to her sister, who lives here, in Sugar Hill. Thusfar in the week, things have been going just fine. Their dog is sweet, so is their cat, and the area is filled with wildlife. They even have a zip line out back that proves faster than I could ever imagine.
But the house is located in a subdivision that should probably be right out of The Stepford Wives. As a matter of fact, this neighborhood is so ’secure’, that they felt it necessary to instruct the people that live two doors from this house to re-paint the door to their house, which is red. Apparently the Neighborhood regulators claimed that it looked, and I quote my semi-employers, ‘like a house of ill repute.’
Besides the ridiculousness and the shitty weather, I’ve been having fun out here. It’s nice to be outside of the city for a while. I actually saw some deer, and an enormous rabbit. The ‘Hooch is a little low, (that’s slang for the Chattahoochee River to all you Yankees) but it’s been that way for a couple of years, due to the drought. I still would like to float it maybe later in the week. I’ll have to ask around, see if anyone wants to blow up a ‘tube and float on down with me. Of course we’ll have to design some sort of rudimentary device that will be capable of floating a cooler full of beer.
It’s good to be a-breathin’.
