A neighbor of ours recently decided that she wants to move to Vermont and has applied for admittance at a housing complex which "keeps an eye" on its residents, most of whom are over the age of seventy.
In filling out the application, she listed my husband as a reference and then proceeded to call us on the phone, four times last week, to review the things that she wants him to say.
"And in the part where they ask if I was ever a nuisance, or a menace, and did I ever cause trouble in the neighborhood, I want you to write, 'No'!"
Resisting the urge to tease her, even slightly, because Matilda's sense of humor seems to have flown out the window, somewhere back in the nineties when her oldest son died, my husband assured her he'd fill the form out correctly and that everything would be fine.
After hanging up the phone he turned to me and said, "Lucky for her they don't ask whether she'll dig up the front lawn and replant it with swamp milkweed because 'that's what the monarch butterflies like' and because she loves it when yards have that 'wild and wonderful look'.
And hopefully the social worker, or whoever it is who looks in on the residents won't be taken aback when he sees a hundred or more butterfly chrysalises hatching in her bathroom, and her hallway, and the kitchen, and the living room, but hey there's no question on the form about any of that, so I think we're good!"
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