I’ve had this long saga going on, dealing with the fellow residents on my street. You may have read the stories and followed along on the blog with this first major part, then the second part where the neighbors took this as a slight to them. As if this was all about some vendetta the city and I had against them. As if I was the only person who complained about the parking around the street, which it turns out has been a long running joke in Chicopee for forever despite their insistence that everything was fine until the troublemakers (us) moved in.

Recently, there was a decision where the street would be a one way street and that they would add some apartment parking on the street. What does this mean for the parking signs? Do we still get no parking around the bend so that emergency vehicles can safely maneuver around the street? I guess we’ll find out when I have to subject myself to another meeting of dirty looks and name calling.

What I do know is that I’ve never felt more safe on the street than I did when the signs went up. Even though I got dirty looks, people yelling passive-aggressively as I was outside because I was the cause for all their problems in the world. They didn’t care that the neighborhood was safer now. They cared that they wanted to do whatever they wanted, park wherever they wanted, because they are entitled to that. They have a right to be pissed; their parking situation is equally nightmarish as our street is with only 110 parking spots for 150 apartments.

I am scared. Not that I’m going to get mugged by my neighbors. My husband, who always worries, got enough of a security system where even if something does happen, it’ll be on camera or I can hit the panic button quickly to scare people off and get help right away. I’m not scared about that. I’m scared that things will go back to the way it was. Where cars wouldn’t be able to see the kids walking to and from the sidewalk to get to their school or bus stop or just going to the playground. I’m scared that I won’t be able to let my son play on the front yard again because what if another tractor trailer ends up on my lawn. Or even get scared about him riding his bike on the street because the cars blocked the speeding cars on the street from seeing him and he gets hurt or killed. I worry about those things. The neighbors? Don’t seem to care. I’m “just mad some pots got destroyed”. They don’t care that I put those pots there for the purpose of causing some resistance so that vehicles would stop driving on my lawn. They don’t care that it wasn’t 1 tractor trailer, it was 4 in 4 years. What if my son was there? What if the one had enough force to actually hit that tree into my house? But yea, totally about those pots….

I hope things turn out better than I’ve imagined in my head. My sons start school soon and I have enough things to worry about when it comes to their safety at school. I don’t need to worry about them getting hurt coming to and from. I don’t need to worry about an emergency happening and the ambulances and fire trucks not getting to us or our neighbors in time to save them. But, I might have to go back to worrying because parking wherever they want is more important than that. And I’m just a horrible human being for thinking that safety matters.