My next door neighbor and I have not always gotten along very well. We both have dogs, and her George and my Raymond play a particularly annoying game of barking-along-the-fenceline. It’s been a source of some tension, but the last few months at least, thing settled into just cool instead of our previous state of low-level hostility. Saturday, I was walking back from the hardware store when I ran into Mike, who lives on the far side of S.’s house. Turns out that part of the reason S. has been so cranky lately is that her mother is dying and…