Our first house was a little frame, one-story on a 50-foot wide city lot. Today, the house would be described as functionally obsolete, but when my wife and I first saw it, it was simply love at first sight. The kitchen was so hopeless that there was absolutely no place for a refrigerator. We wound up installing an undercounter refrig so as not to disturb the wonderful French windows that lined the two outside walls. Those windows stole more than their share of cabinet and appliance wall space but they invited in the light and provided a room devoted to whimsey.

The house was as eccentric as the owners from whom we purchased it. Though it was empty and a wreck with a leaky roof, those owners had held onto the house, unused, for a decade or so. During all those years the place sat empty and unattended. The yard was left to return to its natural prairie origins. The backyard was a sea of bluebells and assorted volunteer plants. There was nothing to resemble a lawn.

To the east of the house lived Betty and Bob Martin and their three children. To the west were Eleanor and Auggie Muller. The day we moved in Auggie introduced himself by uttering as his first words, "you overpaid for this house."

The Martins and the Mullers were all happy to see a family move into the house that sat between them. Someone once said to me that a vacant house is never a happy house because it is not fulfilling its purpose. I think there's truth to that.

But as much as the Martins and Mullers were happy to see a family in the house, they were also happy to be relieved of a decade of chores associated with their adjoining neighbor. They were now excused from mowing the lawn, shoveling the snow and picking up the flyers and mailers that accumulated at the front door of the old place.

That's right, rather than live next to an untended mess, the neighbors of the little brown house on Oakwood Avenue took matters into their own hands. They kept things tended to "next door."

I think of the Martins and the Mullers when I hear or read a discussion of all the vacant houses that have resulted from the sea of house foreclosures occasioned by the financial crises in the ongoing sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

The coverage of this mortgage mess almost always includes some reference to the overgrown yards and untended appearance of vacant houses in the midst of foreclosure. And I wonder to myself, "where are the neighbors?"

Call me selfish, call me nervy, but I could not live next door to a vacant house and ignore the unmown lawn or the accumulated trash or the banging screen door blowing in the wind. Couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. I'd be mowing and cleaning up and securing - just like the Martins and the Mullers did on the vacant house that stood between them for so many years.

This foreclosure mess is going to take a long time to get resolved. A lot of houses are going to sit empty and neglected for long periods of time. The lawns will go uncut, the litter will pile up, the shutters will blow off and the front gate will blow open and slam shut. And the mortgage holders, the reluctant owners of these properties, many have already proven unwilling and incapable of tending to their inventory.

The neighbors next door can play a helpful role in the mess left behind by this mortgage foreclosure epidemic. Call and complain to the bank, sure, if anyone will listen, if anyone will even take your call. But be proactive too. Protect your neighborhood, and your investment. Mow the parkway, latch the garden gate, pick up the flyers tossed on the front stoop. Like the Martins and the Mullers, take some care until your new neighbors arrive home.