I had moved to the suburbs to get away from the city – the heavy traffic, the overcrowded sidewalks, the constant construction – just the general hectic disarray of city-life.

I had been pretty happy living in my little subdivision for the past few months. Sure, it was an adjustment period, getting used to only having two neighbors – as opposed to a dozen. And you had to actively seek life out - living in the city, life just sort of came at you. Out here in the ‘burbs, things just didn’t seem to move as fast.

To my right, in a quaint little two-story brick home with fancy blue shutters and the most perfectly manicured lawn in the neighborhood, was Wayne and his wife Janet. They were both retired and their kids long gone. Wayne pretty much spent all his time in his yard, transplanting trees and sculpting the borders around his many flower-beds. I never saw much of Janet, her hobby was sewing, so she was often pretty much sequestered inside the home. They were both very pleasant and Wayne always stopped to talk with me and just ‘shoot the breeze’ anytime he saw me out in my own yard.

To the left was a young family with two small kids. They had only moved in recently so I hadn’t really had the opportunity to get to know them. The husband kept weird work hours, sleeping during the day and coming and going at all hours of the night. The wife was a stay-at-home mom, and I believe she was preparing to home-school the children. I felt a little apprehensive when they showed up to close on the house. I got the vibe that they are a very religious family, and I worried how that might effect our neighborly relations when they learned of my lifestyle. In any event, it hadn’t as of yet been a problem - mostly as a result of my success in avoidance.

And that was that - my quaint little neighborhood in the suburbs. Sure, there were other homes and families across the road and on down the block, but I never ventured out to meet any of them. People out here mostly kept to themselves, it just wasn’t like it is in the city. Our entire subdivision consisted of a series of houses lining each side of one, single road that curled like a ‘U’, entering and exiting at two points on the ‘main’ road that led back to the highway.

Slowly but surely though, the city was creeping its way out toward us. The older residents who had been here for some considerable time all seemed to have a sense of apprehension about the encroachment of the city. I thought it funny that to me, this was as far removed from city life as one could get, but to them, things were already becoming a little too ‘hectic’, what with the widening of the road from one lane to two last year, and the construction crews bustling back and forth from the new overpass.

But the big event of the summer came when we all received notice that our little neighborhood – which presently gets its water from an underground community well – would be getting hooked up with city water and sewage disposal.

I have to admit. I had become so engendered to this way of life that, at first, I was as incensed as some of the other residents.

“Why can’t they just