A neighbour of mine recently threw a party in his back yard. The party attracted many people, in the house and in the back yard. It was not loud, violent, or destructive, but it was carousing enough for the people next door to come over at around 12:30 a.m. on that weekend night and personally ask for the party to quiet down or move inside.

Inside the house, someone complained that if those neighbours are going to be fussy about the party, then someone should say something about their back yard. There seem to be quite a number of people living in that house and they seem to be of a relatively different lifestyle than of some of the surrounding residents. Often dressed in traditional, modest, folky garments, these people can be seen hanging their laundry, enjoying a smoke on the back porch, barbecuing, or gathering in large number on the back lawn to dance and feast.

Their back yard is not what one would call tidy. The grass, quack and otherwise, grows to its own content, the garden is strewn with tires, canoes hide in bushes, and one side has no fence. While I am reticent to use the word "eyesore", many conventional suburban residents would not hesitate to complain about having to look at that particular property.

Someone at the party claimed to have seen someone of a different ethnicity than the residents ring the front doorbell of the house with the untidy yard, discuss something about the property, then accept an invitation inside. The speaker at the party suggested that this visitor may have been the landlord.

I entered into a discussion at the party regarding this untidy yard. A couple of people voiced disdain for the poor maintenance of yard next door. One person said they did not enjoy having to look at the state of the yard. They claimed that leaving things like furniture on the lawn can lead to insect infestations and disease and health hazards. Also, this person claimed, when the children are as tall as the grass, it is unhealthy for them to play in the grass, and poor lawn care leads to dandelion growth on neighbouring yards. Someone else said that people have an obligation to keep "respectable" yards.

The fact is that if one lives in a city, one lives close to other people. Everybody is not the same, and if one cannot tolerate the differences between people, one should live in the country, on an island, in a forest, or on a boat. Using the word "respectable" as a weapon in order to try to get one's own way is tired and trite. The very idea of being offended by how someone else keeps their backyard is small-minded and selfish. It's the very thing sent up in movies like "Pleasantville" and "Edward Scissorhands", and the very idea cautioned against in novels like George Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World".

People who insist on bending others to their own taste are tiresome and often ridiculed by people who favour the individual freedom on which our society is based. I can't imagine ringing someone's doorbell and asking them to remove their quaint wagonwheel lawn ornament because it's ugly, or because I don't find it respectable.

This spring I hope people will stop quantizing lifestyle and personal aesthetics on some sort of scale of goodness, and realize that the way one lives is not a matter of common sense, but a matter of choice and right.