Our favourite neighbor. We love her so much that one had to exist in both places.
The one at home is our back-to-back neighbor. Her husband, in his time, had a little line with buying old mercedes cars, fixing them (not sure whether personally or paying guys to do it), then selling them to other Rroma guys, who loved these in the 80s-90s. It seems she was his princess, he made sure all her wishes were met. But then he died (late 90s, I think). No children of her own, but perhaps a step daughter, whom we don't see much. Now she's got quite a belly, claims to have a heart condition, can be seen to walk to the other neighbors several times of day (through the yard of Aleksa to our left, their yards touch at the corner, so we cut on our corner by almost a meter, fence going as paper corners in Galactica, so they have a pass, being related; they had a little gate for a while). Complains frequently - about our apricots falling in her yard, about chicken stinking (not really, it's dry, but at the time we think a cat went under the coop's roof to die) but then she comes often to buy eggs. She usually forgets to pay the last carton of eggs each year and pretends in the spring that we're starting clean. For a while she kept asking for cigarettes, then we taught her to make her own and supplied her with a starter pack. And we increased our amount, so we supplied her as well (which she did pay). After a while she complained she coughed from that tobacco and tried to make us buy the rest back. That we wouldn't do, but then were glad we don't need to care about her cigarettes ever again. Then two-three months later she asks for tobacco again. Ah, no, we smoke the bad tobacco which hurts you, don't want to be responsible if it endangers your health, find some other. And then somehow she managed to ramp up her debt to 400 dinars, don't remember what for, and we had enough. Since then, whenever she tries to come up with some other request, we don't even let her finish, just start with a reconciliatory speech about giving her more time to return those 400, there's no rush, no worry.
She's almost an equivalent of an Đuđa, though not a real radiomileva, not in the sense that she visits everybody to exchange gossip, but close enough - she has other relatives or at least 3-4 other houses which make the Roma community in our two streets.
The one in the US was our neighbor on the left side. Divorced, two daughters, small, stocky, wide-shouldered. The ex is a slim guy, saw him only when he delivered the car he promised to the older daughter, and we exchanged some advice on headlight polishing. He didn't have much to say about her. She always parks with the wheels on the edge of her space, so technically within it. Complains frequently about whatever she can - that my masons screwed up her gutter when they were fixing our roof (technically possible, but only because her gutter held by shoestring - the planks into which it was fixed were rotten) and she actually got them to at least pretend to fix it for her. At other times she'd have her various lovers fix things around the house, including the gutter (which had to be done several times, because every rain would find fault in work done). Once, when she was complaining about our magnolia growing too far on her side (true, but why would it matter - the leaves were too heavy to fall that far into her gutters), she had her current lover cut the branch - but not the overhanging part, they didn't have a ladder that tall. He cut it next to the trunk, right in front of our front window. I first yelled at the guy, then switched to "oh man why did you allow her to get you into this kind of trouble"... Never saw the guy again. On another occasion I yelled at her daughter for letting her dog crap on my lawn - pulling every stereotype from the book ("whaddaya think, if we're friggin Easteuropeans that we're less than human? and by the way, this is postman's path, so if he steps in, it will fall off on your doorstep"). Nice pulling the suppressed minority card on a black person - but hey, minority in the street we indeed were.