The view from next door...

Next door lived a very nice old couple (the Sommerfelds), whose bedroom faced my upstairs room. I was constantly afraid the techno, disco, jazz, hip hop, house, funk, and all the rest of the records I played until late hours of the night were going to give them seizures. This wasn't the little blue house where Phi Mu's sorority mother lived, but the white house on the opposite side. The Sommerfelds kept a beautiful backyard garden. Like ours, it stretched all the way back to the chain link fence that separated North Street properties from Rosemary Street parking lots.

The Sommerfelds both passed away several years ago, and now there's a young married couple who live in their house. He and his wife are huge gardeners, so they've kept the backyard garden thriving. And the guy, when he's not attending grad school at UNC, keeps a blog. Since June of 2008 he's watched the Pink House sit vacant, grumbled at Sylvia's failure to maintain the place, and occasionally written about it.

Like in this post:

"This afternoon, under the warm sunlight of these first days of another Chapel Hill spring, I cut behind the empty pink house next door on my way home..."

- Further Musings, "The Beauty of Spring"