This was left for a new resident of an East Whiteland Township neighborhood known as Spring Mill Farms in Malvern. I don’t know who the recipient of this horrible poison pen letter is, I don’t know who wrote the poison pen letter. But the bottom line is simple: this is freaking unacceptable.

Spring Mill Farms is one of the many developments in East Whiteland Township and I think dates back to the late 1960s. Really nice part of the Malvern area. But this development does NOT have a homeowners association or HOA. It’s just a few neighborhoods. It does have a civic association, but that is not the same as an HOA.

When I first moved to Chester County it kind of drove me crazy that people didn’t refer to the road on which they lived, they referred to the development. And as a newcomer I couldn’t keep up with what development was where, nor was that how I identified where someone lived. It still seems foreign to me. What is not a foreign concept is the reality of a nasty neighbor. And apparently there is one or more living in Spring Mill Farms.

Nasty neighbors are sadly a universal issue. And to leave an anonymous poison pen letter like this for a newer neighbor is well…WRONG.

Apparently the letter writer leads a very perfect life. My guess from the tone of the letter is that it’s probably a woman. I could be wrong but that’s the way things are phrased and the things that seem to bother this person. And they are literally telling these people how to place their trash cans, how their windows should be dressed, where the sports equipment for their kids should be, and essentially where the kids should be: in the backyard not seen by the public.

I don’t have neighbors like this. My neighbors are actually nice. Have I ever had crappy neighbors in my lifetime? Yes, who hasn’t?

Also, shock and horrors, this person apparently doesn’t like seeing BBQ grills. Basically this neighbor of Spring Mill Farms would like everyone and every thing placed neatly behind a hedge and to have shutters of distinction. Do you know who this neighbor is? If you do, by all means out them.

Years ago when I lived in Lower Merion Township and was considered a community activist and was also an early blogger, I sometimes had nasty anonymous notes like this literally stuck in my mailbox. I actually had a neighbor write an entire guest editorial to the Main Line Times signing all of her familial names with great pretentiousness directed at me.

The notes left for me in my mail were sometimes truly horrible. I was a bad person, who did I think I was, and more. I remember how horrible some of the notes were and how they made me feel at first. So I feel for whomever got this poison pen letter.

But to the recipient of this letter, I also suggest pink plastic flamingoes. And I would have them playing soccer or doing whatever sports the sports equipment you have set up in the front yard really represents. Fight the nastiness with humor.

To the scribe: when your neighbors expose you (and they will), perhaps apologize? Life is difficult enough without someone like you doing something so wrong like this. We all don’t have to love every neighbor, but this is just wrong.

To the civic association I say simply: deal with this.