So I have this crazy, crazy neighbor. He’s an old guy, and he’s from China. When we first moved into this house a couple of years ago, it was summer, and his yard was so beautiful. There were all these weird white planters everywhere filled with every kind of flower that does well in the Pacific Northwest.

Once we were settled in and I started doing some gardening, I went to the fence and took a closer look. The planters are styrofoam containers, and I swear there are hundreds of them.

The other neighbor told me he has a pet store in Chinatown. The local free weekly, The Stranger, voted it one of Seattle’s creepiest places last year, without even setting foot inside it. The other neighbor refers to his yard as, “ugh, a jungle, a mess,” and told me she was putting a fence up around her upstairs deck, which she did. It looks weird, suspended up there and blocking everything out, but I guess if my deck was up above his yard I would do the same.

I figured out that the planters were originally containers for fish, or for the water plants he sells. I thought it was pretty ingenious at first…until the containers started breaking down. Now I have little stryofoam pills in my backyard that my chickens pick at. To make matters worse, he used a bunch of loose styrofoam pills that were probably packing material to mulch his plants. They blew around everywhere and generally look terrible. Who mulches with styrofoam?

I can count the conversations I have had with him on one hand. When I am out gardening in the summer, he is at work. Once he gave me some seeds for Chinese vegetables that are rare here. I still have them, I have no idea what they would grow into. I am waiting til I have a garden.

Sometimes we discuss my chickens. “Ah,” he says, whenever he sees my remaining Silkie, “Chinese chicken.” Apparently, before we moved in, he had twenty chickens and a peacock. The peacock said “HALP HALP” all day as they are wont to do, and so he put it in his basement. “All its feathers fell out, then it died,” he said.

The twenty chickens were confiscated by Animal Control, because the local legal limit is three. “They turned me in,” he said, vaguely gesturing around to other houses nearby.

I’m still not sure why he left China. He says he had twenty acres there, and kept monkeys, that he had to buy 100 pounds of bananas a week for. He kept chickens, but they kept getting eaten by giant lizards that would come in the fence thin, and would be too full and fat to get out again.

Currently he has a pair of mourning doves that live in a cage on the other side of his house. I know this because I have to sneak around his property sometimes when my chooks bust out of the joint. They always go to his yard first.

When I go over there, I find the doves, mysterious plates of glass, large drums that hold koi or pond plants, and rusty, unidentifiable tools. And lots of styrofoam. And hidden chickens, excitedly pecking at styrofoam pills, rusty nails, and wire bits.

I went to Chinatown to have lunch the other day with my friend and he suggested we pop into my neighbors’ pet store, since I’d never been. As we walked in, a chime sounded and a little box shouted “Hello, and welcome!” in a recorded woman’s voice.

My neighbor was scuttling around, helping a customer select fish. I have never seen a pet store like his. It had that heavy ocean smell, and was floor-to-ceiling with merchandise. It was more like a pet bazaar than than a pet store. Among the albino frogs, crabs, lobsters, and those scary bubble-headed goldfish, was a lone cockatiel that I thought looked sort of nervous.

“Hello,” my neighbor gave me a little nod and went back to speaking Chinese with his customer. We left soon after and the little door box shouted at us again. “Goodbye, thank you for coming!”

Once I told him I had a tree stump to remove in my yard. “Oh, very bad,” he said. “Evil spirits live in stumps. You should dig out.” Now I think of him everytime I step over an old stump.