“Neighbourhood Watch: Unhinged Edition” by Catherine Brazeau

Notes from the Paranoid Suburbs 

She watched us. Every day, she’d peer through her drapes on self-assigned surveillance duty, eyes fixed on us—a bubble-gum battalion of pre-teen girls on banana-seat bikes with the audacity to exist within her line of sight. We were harmless, mostly. But in her mind, we were plotting something against her.

She wrote letters to my mother, which she mailed, despite living next door. Passive-aggression always lands better with postage. Each one “a warning” to “control your daughter and her friends”.

To be fair, we did once lob clumps of mud over the fence and into her swimming pool. We were eleven, maybe twelve: the age of wonder and small cruelties fuelled by straws of powdered candy, our beloved Pixy Stix.

But those letters.

More than 50 years later, I’m reading them again. The pages are yellowed and smell faintly of hairspray. Yes, AquaNet, still holding the past firmly in place. Some of her letters stretched five and six pages long—an Olympic feat of grievance-writing that revealed a disturbing paranoia.

She wasn’t okay. She probably never was. Her backward cursive slants hard, like it’s fighting against the wind of its undoing. Each letter grew more unhinged, more hyperbolic. 

Our laughter was transformed into us running up to her car and screaming accusations. Her husband, she wrote, “was afraid to come home from work,”  presumably because of our menacing hopscotch.

“I’m listening and watching. I hear everything they say,” she wrote. “I’m not going to sit quietly by while your bitch of a daughter and her friends have fun at my expense.”

Today, she’d probably have motion detectors, a Ring cam, and maybe even a GoFundMe called Help Me Rid the Neighbourhood of These Children.

She thought we were a threat, but really, we were just girls on bikes practicing being alive, and that’s always going to sound too loud for somebody. I suppose we could’ve been nicer. But then again, she could’ve just closed her curtains.

I sometimes wonder what it cost her to feel that hunted, that sure the neighbourhood children were plotting her downfall. Imagine believing that our laughter was a weapon aimed squarely at her. It’s one thing to be paranoid—it’s another to think the enemy is fun itself.

So, what do you do with a neighbour like that?

Well, my mother didn’t reply with a ransom-style letter made from cut-out magazine clippings. Nor did she bake cookies as a peace offering. Our neighbour wouldn't have eaten them anyway—she’d have suspected poison, of course.

Instead, my mom insisted: You stay visible. You ride faster. You laugh louder. You keep showing up with bikes and bubble gum. You let her know—we’re not going anywhere. You let her know—we’re watching, too.

So, we kept riding, kept laughing, and we learned something. Joy is defiant. And slightly scandalous.

***

Catherine Brazeau is a retired designer and brand consultant who enjoys cooking, running, and exploring creativity through writing. Most of all, she delights in spending time with her four grandchildren, whom she calls the greatest antidote to ageism. “My grandkids don’t ignore me yet,” she jokes.

She lives in Pelham with her husband of 40+ years, who is also an artist. An occasional columnist for PelhamToday.ca, her essays also appear on The Next Iteration on Substack.

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