The Sage Pointe Nine.

Previously, I wrote about the Weede family and their fusty skunk hijinx, and the story kept on expanding over time.

To recap:  In one apartment lived the matronly mother and one of her grown sons.  Across the hall lived her daughter, her husband, and their two kids.  Then one summer, the Weede family expanded their population in the Sage Pointe complex with the matron’s other son, his girlfriend, and their baby who all moved in with her.  That made a total of nine Weedes in two apartments: five people in Mamma Weede’s place, and four in the other.

With this addition came much more garbage in the dumpster.  Almost overnight, the garbage dumpster was overflowing only a couple of days after the garbage was picked up.  It was hard to say if it was only because of the three-person increase overnight in the building’s population, or not.  Some of the garbage dumped pointed to other people, so it probably was a combination of more people in the building and those other residents who were getting ready to move out (and that’s another story),

But what did point to the Weede family was the indoor pool area.  It got messier and messier with a sickening overload of beach balls, floats, and tiny plastic toys sitting at the bottom of the pool that they left, as if the pool area was theirs alone.  They wouldn’t clean up their possessions, but rather, they left their things for other residents to trip over, and they complained a lot if the pool was in repair.  La-di-da.  It even got to a point that they left their pool toys all over the common property, and one beach ball made it to the pond area:

Although their contributions to the marijuana stench in the building decreased for a while, it eventually returned.  The entire floor in the hallway was an aromatic offering that ranged from “forest‑floor funk” to “burnt tire with herbal aspirations.”  They left the elevator lingering with the aroma of greasy chicken and the tang of old tacos.  Their front doors were like portals to a different dimension, one where the ventilation systems and their filters went to die and rot.

In the end, the Weede clan became less a family and more a weather system that rolled in without warning, reshaped the landscape, and left its own peculiar sediment behind.  Their presence swelled and receded, their odors rose and fell, their toys multiplied like spores in the humid air of the indoor pool.  The areas outside their storerooms got to a point that they looked like a flea market with all the junk, furniture, and other assorted garbage left out.   And though their skunky fog ebbed for a hot minute, it always found its way back, drifting through vents and lingering in the hallways like a reminder that some households don’t just live in a building; they colonize it and make it bad for the other owners who respect neighbors.  Yet, at Sage Pointe, the Weedes were not merely neighbors.  They were an atmosphere of eccentric proportions that took over and conquered.