Situation Report · The War Room · Origins · The Escalation · The Judges · The Treaty · Intelligence · Operation 1999 · The Full Timeline

SITUATION REPORT

I'm Jeannie Landreth. I'm thirty-nine, I manage a dental office, and I live on Maple Court, a cul-de-sac of nine houses in Johnson County, on the Kansas side of Kansas City. Directly across the circle from me lives Doreen Dufour.

Doreen is my friend. We carpool to the kids' practices. We feed each other's cats when somebody's out of town. Her husband Leon helped my husband Joe put in our sprinkler system, and nobody got hurt. Eleven months of the year we are the best neighbors on the street.

From October 1 to October 31, we are at war.

It's a friendly war. It's a PG war. Nobody has ever been frightened who didn't want to be, and nothing in either yard has ever dripped. But it is a war, it has been going on since 1996, and it has escalated in ways that the Maple Court Homeowners' Association did not anticipate when they wrote the bylaws. This page is the official history, as kept by our side.

THE WAR ROOM
Status board, as of Saturday, September 25, 1999. Posted on the refrigerator and here.

ORIGINS: THE JACK-O'-LANTERN INCIDENT
October 1996

In October of 1996, Joe, Caroline and I carved three jack-o'-lanterns at the kitchen table on a Saturday afternoon and set them on the front steps. A happy one, a scary one and one Caroline did herself that looked surprised. That was it. That was the whole plan.

Sunday morning, Doreen had four on her steps.

I want to be fair. Doreen says she always has four, one for each member of the household, counting the cat. I say I'd lived across the street from her for three years and she had never had four. On Monday I had six. On Tuesday she had nine, and Leon was seen carrying pumpkins from the grocery store to his truck at nine o'clock at night. On Wednesday I drove out to a pumpkin patch in the country on my lunch hour, came back with eight more, and carved until one in the morning. Joe went to bed at ten. He said, and I'm quoting him, "It's only a few pumpkins."

Halloween night I had fourteen. At six o'clock, when the porch lights came on, Doreen had fifteen.

The fifteenth one was me. Carved in my likeness, glasses and all, with my hair done in a sort of fringe of pumpkin strings. It was a very good likeness. Joe stood at our front window and looked at it a long time, and then he said, "She got your nose."

I laughed until I had to sit down on the steps. Then I stood up and went across the street and shook Doreen's hand, and I told her that this meant war. She said, "I know." That was the beginning.

THE ESCALATION
The short version. The long version, with every date, is The Escalation Timeline, 1996-1999.

1997: THE FOG MACHINE
I bought a fog machine at the party store in September. I tested it in the garage on a Saturday in October and set off our smoke alarm, which is how the whole street found out about it before I'd planned. Doreen answered with a cassette of spooky sounds playing out of her front window: their basement door creaking, the furnace, and Leon groaning in a way he says he did not have to practice. On Halloween night the fog worked beautifully until a quarter past seven, when the wind turned and carried every bit of it across the cul-de-sac into Doreen's yard, where it made her look terrific. She sent Seth over with a thank-you note.

1998: THE GRAVEYARD AND THE SKELETON
I spent September evenings in the garage cutting tombstones out of foam insulation board with a steak knife, thirteen of them, and painted them gray and wrote the epitaphs myself. Here they are. I'm proud of every one.

Doreen's answer was a skeleton. A full-size plastic one, sitting in a lawn chair on her porch with a bowl of candy in its lap, and Leon wired it to a motion sensor off an old driveway light and a tape player hidden under the chair. Every time something moved in front of it, it talked, in Doreen's voice, which she recorded at her kitchen table. Some of what it said, written down by me over the course of October, because I heard it every single time I went out for the mail:

The skeleton is why the Treaty now has an Article 7.

THE JUDGES

After 1996, when both sides claimed victory and nobody could prove anything, the children of Maple Court formed the Maple Court Junior Judging Panel. They walk both yards together at seven o'clock on Halloween night, in costume, with clipboards, and they announce the verdict from the middle of the cul-de-sac at seven-thirty. Their decision is final. We've tried.

How they score: one to ten in each of four categories. Spookiness (but if anybody cries, that's points off). Lights. Originality. And Candy, where full-size bars count double.

On bribery: Full-size candy bars are not bribery. This has been ruled on.

THE TRUCE TALKS

Every November 1, the morning after, Doreen and I sit down at her kitchen table over coffee and a bowl of whatever candy is left, and we talk about how it went. The first year it was just coffee. The second year, Joe said we ought to write things down, so we did, on the back of a church bulletin, and that became the Treaty of Maple Court. It's taped inside both our garage doors.

INTELLIGENCE REPORTS: DOREEN'S GARAGE
Observed from our living room window, September 1999. Nothing on this list was obtained by sneaking. That's in the spirit of the Treaty, if not the letter.

OPERATION 1999
CODE NAME: OPERATION SQUASH

Doreen reads this page. I know she does, because last year she quoted the War Room back to me at the bus stop. So the plan for 1999 is classified. Here is what I can release.

What I can tell you: it's PG, it's big, and it lights up. What I can't tell you is everything else.

T-MINUS 36 DAYS to Sunday, October 31, 1999

READ THE ESCALATION TIMELINE, 1996-1999 >>

Visitors to the War Room since October 1998:

(At least forty of them are Doreen.)

Got a yard war of your own? Send me your war stories. Doreen, this means you, too.
[email protected]

Last updated Saturday, September 25, 1999
Back to Hollywood