All the lawns on Mentone Avenue are mowed on Wednesdays. All the houses on Mentone Avenue are painted white in the second week of every third May. All the yards on Mentone Avenue are surrounded by impeccable, equally white fences which are inspected quarterly.

All except for number 13. The unkempt lawn of 13 Mentone Avenue is the threshold to a house with grayed wooden siding and cracked windows. 13 Mentone Avenue also has no fence. It doesn’t need one. No neighbor or ne’er-do-well ever steps foot past the edge of the sidewalk onto the property. Patty Prettersen, always dressed in clean, pressed skirt suits even goes as far as to cross the street when she nears the house.

“Strange people.” Oliver Clark, the across-the-street-neighbor, says daily while he checks his mail and glares.

The inhabitants of 13 Mentone Avenue are, indeed, “strange people”; and it has never bothered them that their neighbors thought so.

Ms. Byrd, the eldest, is a short and hefty woman. Her silver hair is long and slightly frizzy. She is kind and friendly, but mostly keeps to herself and her beloved cats. Ms. Wise-Heath, the second resident of number 13, is tall and spindly, quite a bit like the dead tree on the edge of the property. She is often outside in her over-sized gardening hat, harvesting and tending to her overgrown patch of vegetables and herbs. Ms. Wise-Heath, too, is friendly, always popping her head up from the patch to yell ‘hello’ or ‘how do you do?’ to passersby. But nobody has ever answered, they just shuffle along at an even quicker pace and scowl at the upkeep of the house.

All sorts of rumors stirred about these strange folk in their strange house. But the fact of the matter is that they simply have better things to do than to worry about some grayed siding, or a cracked window or some long grass; besides, Ms. Byrd has tried time and time again to get a contractor out to fix the windows, but one look at the house and they turn heel; and painting the exterior white would be boring, they would much rather paint it blue or yellow or red or some fun color that the neighbors would no doubt be scandalized at; and Ms. Wise-Heath knew it was bad for her pollinators to cut the grass.

And so they, Misses Byrd and Wise-Heath, decided that every Wednesday they would simply stay inside and avoid the judgmental eyes of all of the neighbors upon them. On Tuesday nights, Ms. Byrd calls in her cats and sets out food for the rest and Ms. Wise-Heath clips her herbs and vegetables that she needs for the following day. One-by-one on each Wednesday morning the lawnmowers start up around 9:00am, and then one by one they finish. A choir round of roaring mowers. Until this Wednesday, when they stopped all at once.

And Mentone Avenue, Ms. Byrd and Ms. Wise-Heath, never hear a lawnmower roar again.

The End.