Yesterday Bob and I were sitting in the backyard enjoying a glass of cheap white wine after work when we heard a loud BEEP BEEP BEEP coming from the street. We looked past the gate and saw a white and blue fire truck pulling into our neighbor’s yard. Again.

Bob set his wine glass down and hustled over to the neighbor’s house while I shooed our curious kids inside.

Ambulances, police cars and fire trucks are weekly visitors to my neighbor’s house, but they usually come during the daytime when only Bob is home to see them. The kids and I usually hear about it later. “P is in the hospital again,” Bob will say.

It falls to Bob to call her children, feed her dog, pick up her mail and help her into her house whenever she returns. This cycle has been going on for about a year now.

P is only in her sixties but her body is giving out from a combination of abuse, disease and neglect. Yesterday the EMS person told Bob the medication P is taking now is so heavy duty that she should not be living alone anymore. And yet, she is.

P’s children seem either paralyzed to act, or else they are moving at glacial speed. They say they are going to put her in an assisted living facility, but when? It seems they are playing a waiting game with their mother. It’s a game I will never play with my mother, and one I pray my children will never play with me.

As neighbors we cannot make the call to put P in a home. We cannot gather her things and say, “Don’t worry anymore. You’ll be taken care of. You’re going to be okay.”

I pray for my neighbor, feeling impotent. I’m glad to see the paramedics these days. Used to be when P went to the hospital, I’d pray that she could come home soon. Now I pray that she does not.

My husband e-mails me with a link to a story he wrote about our school district changing its zoning. The upshot is that our kids will probably not go to the junior high and high school I had my heart set on. They will probably go to a junior high and high school with lower scores in crummier buildings with a much higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students.

I call my husband to discuss what we are going to do about this. He has the gall to tell me that we have some time before Boy is ready for junior high and that things could change between now and then.

He also says that if the district goes through with its rezoning plans, we should work to help make the schools better and more equitable for all students. Can you believe that? The nerve of him!

That is not what I want to hear! What I want to hear is, “Baby, don’t worry about it. We will buy a piece of property right next to that school of your dreams and pitch a yurt.”

FYI: A yurt is a round, portable structure that’s very popular in Mongolia. A friend of mine has a beautiful one on her property in Brenham, and I could definitely live in one for seven years while my offspring attend the schools of my dreams.

I haven’t mentioned my yurt idea to Bob yet. He’ll probably further inflame me with more logic and sound reasoning. I absolutely hate it when that happens.

The ruts down by the river are gone. Last year, there were tracks along the banks left by my 12-year-old neighbor boy from his ATV. He’d make a wide circle, cutting through two of my other neighbor’s yards, then inevitably ending up on our property, which always had the deepest gashes. The neighbor boy and the ATV deeply impressed my son, who informed me that when I died, he was going to buy himself an ATV.

This boy appeared like a stray dog, sometimes in a pack of kids with bikes, sometimes pedaling alone on the winding roads of our strange, quirky neighborhood. He’d always nod to us, serious face, his blond hair flopping over his eyes.

I never yelled at him about the ruts but my husband put the fear of God into him and his friends one day after this tight pack of boys decided to turn our little swath of riverbank into their after-school club house, littering it with candy wrappers and Coke bottles. “You wouldn’t do this in your own homes, would you?” my husband hollered. Maybe they would.

An only child, my neighbor boy took to the streets because there was nothing at home. His mom was working or sick, his dad yelling or gone somewhere up the road without him. I don’t know the details of this boy’s life, but he had a sweetness about him that compelled my son to hug him on sight.

I’m writing about this boy as if he’s dead, but he’s not; he’s just gone. The sick mom left the yelling dad and took my neighbor boy with her. It’s turning into a nasty divorce, so the gossip goes. I hear that the boy is acting out in school, where he was a good student before. “He doesn’t stand a chance,” said another neighbor who’s close to the boy’s father. We’re only getting one side of the story. I’m sure the other side is a doozy.

Now I keep expecting to see my neighbor boy riding slowly down the road, or burning toward me in an ATV. He’s standing just outside my peripheral vision, the place where dead pets go.

I lost another neighbor boy a long time ago, another blond with hair in his eyes. He used to reach over the fence and pet my dog. One day he was showing his friends his dad’s gun collection and somehow this show-and-tell turned into Russian roulette and somehow he shot himself in the head. That night I wanted to make his family some supper but the only thing I had in the cupboard was spaghetti and that looked too much like what was on their wall so I went out and bought sandwiches instead. After that his little sister turned into a stray dog and spent most of her time in my backyard, away from that living room where it happened. Her mom would hang over my fence and watch the girl playing with my dog and cat, wishing she would come back home. The mom was lost, too.

So here’s where I’m supposed to say something pithy or profound about neighbors coming in and out of our lives, but I don’t have any good words for this. Just a lingering sadness — my emotional muscles that carry loss seem to atrophy with age.

Used to be when friends or neighbors went out of my life, I wouldn’t think about it much. But now I feel it deep in the bones.