When I moved to our first house in Salt Lake City, I came alone. We had kids still in school in the middle of a school year, and my husband was integral to the move of the company he had joined. Our new next door neighbor's wife, among others, introduced herself, told me she and her husband owned the house just across the alley above the house that led to our garage. She seemed a little manic but since we had purchased a 10,000 square foot white elephant, I didn't have time to socialize.
Eventually, after supervising the reconstruction and installation of a kitchen in what had been a grand mansion, my husband and sons came to Utah and we were all invited for what the invitation said was snacks and drinks. The new neighbors had two very young children, one three and one about 18 months. The brief encounter was almost the only face to face encounter I had with any of the four people for several years but not the only impact they had on my life.
Shortly after our friendly encounter, police cars came in the middle of the night to the house across the alley. They hauled off the husband and the next day we found out that the husband had been accused of spousal abuse by his wife who told me in a brief encounter that he had been drunk and belligerent and socked her. She moved herself and the children out of the house while he was in jail and soon he moved back in because she didn't press any charges.
So life went on and he didn't have his children but before anyone knew anything they were back. She liked them when they were kittens but she didn't like them much when they became cats so she returned the children to the man she had accused of abuse. After that point the kids bounced around between the two houses but as far as we could tell, no one had a plan or an idea about how to bring up two children.
When they were at their father's house the two were simply incorrigible. One day in early summer, the son and daughter aged approximately 6 and 8, threw bushels of ripe apricots at my house and garage leaving a sticky, pulpy mess. As their house was somewhat uphill of my own I saw them quite clearly and went out on my back porch to tell them they were idiots if they thought I couldn't see what they were doing. Then I went to their house to tell their father that I expected that the duo would come and clean up every single lump of apricot pulp on our property.
From that day it became almost an all out war and as the children grew older they grew more dangerous. The daughter chose to live with the mother more or less full time while the son came to live with his father. One house guest of ours caught the son doing a peeping tom act while she was in the shower. The son from the age of about 12 enjoyed smoking on his back porch and throwing the lit butts over the fence into our yard. I always picked up every single butt and put all of them outside their back shed. Then the son took to throwing black cat firecrackers at our dogs. Besides the cruelty of that scenario, the black cat firecrackers were illegal where we lived so that time I called the police. Although the boy went inside when he saw the police car, the odor of firecrackers was strong and the debris in the yard bolstered my testimony. But at the time I was flying my flag upside down and the police officers (the city sent six) told me I had asked for all the trouble. When the boy was in high school he encouraged his friends to throw trash and other refuse in our yard.
So when the father tried to get me arrested for "threatening" him and his son, even accusing me of spying on them with binoculars (which were in fact the magnifying lenses I use occasionally for threading needles and doing very close work on my quilts--completely useless for anything further away than three to five inches). I told the police officer that he needed to be very careful, that the father had been a college football player at Syracuse who had been arrested for spousal abuse and had his son taken at one point for child abuse charges. I told him that it seemed unlikely to me that anyone would find the accusations credible since I am only 5'4" and at the time was quite thin and even the son was much taller and heavier than I will ever be. The officer went away without any further effort to charge me.
I saw both father and son quite recently at a grocery store. They looked more disheveled and clueless than ever.
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