The Couscous Chronicles

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of meeting my “new” neighbors Jackie and Josiah Saunders.A more proper description would be I met my “future” new neighbors given my wife and I are able to eventually sell our semi-customized “Mac Mansion” tract home in the booming Cincinnati mega suburb of West Chester; AKA the “Dub C”population 75000 and noted for the giant landmark blue and yellow IKEA flanking I-75, and relocate to our recently acquired two year old custom built builder’s home in the leafy inner I-275 beltway suburb of Glendale population 22oo known for being “the only village in Ohio designated a National Historic Landmark by the U. S. Department of Interior (www.glendaleohio.org).  I don’t know if West Chester has a town symbol, but I think the closest thing would be the ubiquitous “Coming Soon” sign while for Glendale the town symbol is immortalized in the giant metal art squirrels dotting the village landscape as part of an art project modeled after downtown Cincinnati’s 2000 Great Pig Gig.  The Saunders live in a almost pinkish light red brick 1958 modified ranch home framed up and surrounded by meticulously maintained gardens interspersed throughout the front and back yards.   I had admired their back yard from a distance during several of my previous visits to the “new” home and I was honored to finally meet its care takers on a day that found me quickly darting to and for about my own yard trying to kill weeds with a recycled bottle of Ortho “Weed-B-Gone”.We made our acquaintances at the partially rusting metal fence that separates our two backyards.  The Saunders energetically introduced themselves and welcomed me to Glendale.  Jackie and Joe both being African American and decidedly senior with a slight air of academia in their mannerisms and speech.  While we did not share our occupations, they both reminded me of retired college professors making them quite a cute couple with Jackie citing, “I spend most of my time in the basement…I live there and Joe lives in the upstairs”.Oddly enough following introductions Josiah or “Joe” as Jackie calls him, acting as though he had known me for years and was simply picking up on a previously unfinished conversation launched immediately into a politically charged diatribe against why last year’s $800 billion banking industry stimulus package was a conspiracy to rob all of us hard working Americans blind.  Nice!In the passing of approximately forty-five minutes several of which were interrupted (at least for me) by the incessant crowing of a rooster in someone’s nearby back yard the Saunders not only educated me on how Jackie had “jumped the fence” last year attempting to exterminate the poison ivy vines dripping over a portion of our shared fence with “Brush-B-Gone” to alerting me that my new home had been built on a former water well that tapped into a series of underground artisian wells that some day would flood my basement as it has theirs following several days of heavy rain for the past twelve years they have lived in their home.   Not so nice!The Saunders were also a repository of recent local history, sharing the time their nephew was chased down the street by a deer, “the worst thing that can happen is if you get a deer in your yard”.  They also knew their share of Glendale antiquity in describing how Joe was a third generation Glendalean (can I say that?), the son of a former track star whose name graces a small park near my new home’s cul-de-sac called Saunders Park.  Jackie and Joe disagreed on whether his father’s local track record had ever been broken with Joe clarifying that it was his Grandfather’s track record that was broken in 1977 and that his father’s still stood the test of time.Joe also educated me on how Glendale had been developed back in 1855 by the original Procter of THE Procter & Gamble soap company and that he built the town as a rail commuter suburb connected via rail line directly to his Ivorydale soap plant.  Joe also mentioned his Grandfather despite the rail line did indeed drive the Procter patriarch to Cincinnati from time to time and that several Procter descendants still inhabited homes near the Glendale village square.I could tell the Saunders could have talked all day, but I needed to get back home to the family and so as I spotted and pounced on spraying a nearby gargantuan weed, announced I needed to continue you on finishing out my weed extermination campaign and I looked forward to speaking again.  Overall this was a conversation and history lesson worth listening to and now I am not only looking forward to selling the “Dub C” Mac Mansion but to also move into the new Glendale home and to having more future interesting conversations with the Saunders.  A positive foot note on the basement flooding situation is it seems the future chance of that happening has somewhat been negated by a huge black plastic pipe that was recently partially buried in my back yard by the previous owner to carry away water to avoid basement flooding.  One more mystery solved, thanks Jackie and Joe!