It was, in retrospect, presumptuously naive of me to imagine that the right time had arrived, several weeks back -- when nothing out of the ordinary was occurring in this neighbourhood too close to home and nature had tired of encouraging the urban forest to send its seed and pollen everything -- that it was finally "safe" for me to clean the windows and window screens.

I was, I must admit, happy to get it all done, finally. A sense of closure, having put off that chore when the balance of the spring cleaning activities had taken place months earlier, overcame me, delightfully. A sigh of relief, another job done, no need to think any more about it, no nagging sense of guilt that I hadn't tackled it. Well, well, just as well we can't look into the future, even if that future was no more than several weeks in coming.

It's now the third week that landscaping construction has been carried out on the property next to ours. We've become accustomed to the early-morning wake-up of heavy equipment rumbling about from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily. And sigh with frustration when the equipment being used tosses clouds of stone-dust and other soil particulates about the atmosphere. Our neat and tidy, colourful garden has taken the brunt of it all. It distresses me no end to see the brightness occluded with the dull overlay of dust that has settled over everything.

We cleaned the glass frontage of the porch door of the grime that had settled upon it, but the windows, newly gathering copious amounts of particulate matter and stonedust will just have to wait until the entire job has been completed. Despite all the mechanical equipment at their disposal the men working on the contract have plenty to do, since our neighbours decided to rip up everything that had been artistically installed in previous landscape renovations to even earlier work they'd had done. This must be the third incarnation of The Perfect Landscape Job.

From what we're able to see when we occasionally glance over, there isn't all that much creativity that has gone into the project; already it betrays the fairly standard 'new' looks that we have become familiar with, reflected in another, earlier renovation that our friend Serge, three doors down from our next-door neighbour had done, and our other neighbour Simon, up the street, had completed last summer. The difference primarily? a new type of stone to replace the pavers previously installed, still in fine condition but the  wrong size and colour, evidently.

Keeping up with the Smiths has never been so competitive.