You work at home in peace for almost a year. The street you live on is a quiet side road. You back up to a park with a stream. Many nice families live here. Many people are away from home working each day. Sometimes a mother walks her baby to the park. You hear birds singing in the trees around the house. All respect the neighborhood.

Then some months ago, someone buys the on-the-market-forever house diagonally from you across the street. A teen boy (the word boy on purpose) comes with that someone, and suddenly that old garage that sits not far back enough from the street houses an evening garage band from time to time, and the street is filled with football-throwing, loud-whirring-motorbike-riding, rowdy teens all day and night who refuse to get out of the street when you drive by and give you the Outsider kid look out the corners of their eyes. New neighbors move in below with a number of kids of all ages, and these kids join other loud kids on the street from time to time. Your brain starts to fall out of your head as you desperately try to focus on neuropsychology articles while that damn motorbike does a bumblebee impression up and down the long street, over and over. You don't want to close the windows, damn them. It's sunny and breezy out and why should you have to? On regular nights some other male friend visits in his souped-up car and revs up the engine to sound his large muffler pipes and then races back and forth like we live on a drag strip. Then you find your sideview mirror bent into your car and a white streak on the rounded plastic of it, and you're happy that it's not broken but you know that someone must have smacked right into it, and you never had this happen before those congregating kids.

Maybe it's because I grew up on a very busy street and never heard kids playing right outside my windows, and believe me I try to be zen about it all and smile at the joy I sometimes hear in their screams, but when their raucousness (and no, I'm not being a middle-aged crab here; it's not their expressing their "kidness" that gets me, as this street has had young kids playing and laughing outside before) keeps me stuffy and behind in my work, I get a bit worked up. I just keep repeating to myself, "Remember, we're renting. Eventually we'll leave. Remember, we're renting. Eventually we'll leave."