The Dragon Lady

We have pretty nice neighbors. Just as French as in all the neighborhoods I've lived in over the last few years. You know, an occasional "bonjour" . . . or not. A sidelong glance, peut-être. Never an invitation to dinner or a need to borrow a monkey wrench or an egg like my American neighbors. Cakes must just get baked without those extra ingredients and everyone has full tool sheds of their own I suppose.

We do have a few out of the ordinary neighbors here though. Maybe it's because we own our home now. I'll talk about the worst one first.

The Dragon Lady.

TDL owns the house which is mitoyen with ours. Mitoyen in French sort of denotes "next to" as in the style American's refer to as a townhouse. Mitoyen homes are common in France because in the old days if you built your home next to another home you two or three could all share your cozy warm walls. This was obviously before standard heating systems turned us all into obnoxiously independent voisin's. Anyway, homes that are mitoyen nowadays have property deeds and in the deeds they usually outline little sectors deemed as copropriétées. Often the copropriétée is just a shared doorstep or part of a roof or a doorway. Our house has a copropréietée with TDL. We own some grungy little workrooms in our courtyard and she owns the upper floor of the grungy workrooms where she has yet another apartment that she rents. The bathroom window of this apartment looks down into our courtyard, and we can look up. We don't but they often do.

TDL apparently decided shortly after we moved in that this particular aparment needs a new roof. Apparently the one covering this apartment is destroyed. Apparently she wants us to pay for half of it because of the fact that our grungy workrooms "share" the benefit of this roof. Apparently this is all legal and apparently she won't bother with the new roof if we'll just give her the workrooms which aren't really much use anyway and were loaned to the former owner's grandmother by TDL's grandmother back at the turn of the century and apparently accidentally taken over by the former owners (are ya with me?) SO, we are being blackmailed by TDL who sends us lettres récommandées (registered letters) nearly every other month which we simply file in our household books in a special section labeled TDL.

We had a roofer inspect the roof without telling her. In fact we called a roofer that was on the list of roofers she had given us in one lettre récommandeé. He said the roof was fine. In fact he said "this roof is fine and that's what I told this woman!" (he seemed annoyed...Apparently TDL is annoying to everyone!). He continued "I told her it was just that her chimney leaks!" Well, laaaa-deee! We had her trapped, the big fat liar. We confronted her. She said the man was sorely mistaken. She promptly sent us another estimate from YET ANOTHER roofer (meanwhile she's slowly running out of contractors) with an even more inflated price.

We will never sell or give TDL those grungy workrooms. She is so obnoxious that if we sell them to her she will build yet another apartment looking directly into our courtyard. The people will smoke like all of her tenants do and the cigarette butts will land in my flower pots like they already do from her little bathroom window tenants.

We have other nice neighbors. I'll talk about them in another post. They don't even belong on the same page with TDL.