Alone in the Hot Tub

Photo credit: Robsalot (that's me!)

So we bought a hot tub, and it wasn’t too long after it was installed that something rather strange started to happen, our neighbors started to talk to us. First were Hunter’s parents who lived in the little blue house across the way. No Hunter wasn’t their kid, it was their cute little dog (don’t ask me why we remembered the dog’s name and not the owners). Hunter’s parents are on a similar morning routine to us, and we often see them heading out the door for work at the same time we do. Some mornings we would even exchange a cursory head nod, or maybe even a wave, but then one day, out of the blue, they started actually saying “Hello” and “Good Morning” to us. Things progressed from there; they would start crossing the street in an attempt to engage in actual conversations with us, and it wasn’t just them either, all the neighbors started doing it.

Chuck would catch up with us when we returned home from work. Was he waiting in his living room, peaking through his blinds, watching for us to come home so he could rush out of his house to say hi?

Then there was our next door neighbor, Joan Rivers (okay, that isn’t her real name, we made it up, we don’t actually know her real name, even though somehow she knows ours). We started running into her every Thursday morning, while racing against the garbage truck to get our trash cans out on the curb at 6 am. Getting sucked into a conversation with my neighbor who had never said a word to me before was the last thing I wanted to deal with that early in the morning.

Even the nurse and the professor who lived on the other side of us began to go out of their way to talk to us. (No, I don’t really know their professions; I just assumed based on their clothing choices, again, I had never said more than 10 words to these people before they suddenly started roping us into random, mundane, conversations).

As you can imagine, this was all very disconcerting for a couple of introverts like us.  Then, one evening, we heard a commotion outside. We peered out our window to find all of our neighbors gathered in the street, talking and wildly gesturing toward our house. Now, our house is a little 100-year-old bungalow, and the sound proofing isn’t the best, so with our ears pressed to the door we listened in on the conversation. They were talking about us… and our hot tub. It seemed the neighbors had a little bet going regarding who would be the first to score an invite to use our Jacuzzi. Of course my husband and I knew what we had to do, we retreated to our backyard oasis, where we cranked up the bubbles to maximum (ensuring the whole neighborhood could hear the jets), and settled in for a nice long soak, alone.