Peace Offering
I think I was the annoying neighbor. I used to live in a townhome complex where the back “porches” were just slabs of concrete and there was a field that connected all of them together.
One night, I had like six friends over and we were on the slab grilling some chicken wings. We weren’t too loud (we had no music playing and we weren’t trashed), but I imagine we were still audible to the other buildings.
A woman from across the way started hollering at us, threatening to call the authorities. A few of my friends were like, “Screw that lady,” but I decided to take a different route.
I plated up about eight wings with our scratch-made buffalo sauce and walked it over to the lady on a paper plate. I then apologized for disturbing her, handing over the plate as a sort of peace offering.
She told me she overreacted and was sorry for yelling at us. I told her it was okay, but I also asked her if she was doing alright because she’d probably had a terrible day; yelling at strangers for a little noise at 7 pm on a Friday like that.
She ended up confessing that she did have a bad day, and I told her I was sorry. Moving forward, we kept our volume at a reasonable level as a courtesy to her.
A little while later, she yelled back over that they were the best wings she’d ever had, and we gave a little cheer back to her. Never heard from her again. Hope her days are better now.