Robin

 I came around the corner to see someone had dumped a clumsily nested stack of kitchen trashcans on the edge of the lot behind our house. Different colors and sizes. 

The lot was also our property, former location of a no-tell Motel back when the clubs were popular down here.

When I looked up from the trashcans, I saw more stuff deeper into the lot, and someone sleeping in the grass, covered by clothes.

The lot is narrow and lined by small trees on both sides which gives it a tranquil, sheltering feel.

As I walked over to the sleeping person, I saw more stuff: two bicycles, a red plastic wagon, bags of clothes.

"Good morning," I said to the covered form. They stirred and pulled the jacket off their face. 

It was Robin. Robin had been hanging around the neighborhood for a couple of months. We had run her off the derelict property across the street about a month before. She was stocky, fit-looking, with a curly blonde Mohawk.

I'm sorry, but you need to go, I told her. She agreed, and I walked away with our dog. Once back inside, I told my wife. As my wife left to work, Robin was still sleeping there, so we both went to tell her she needed to leave. 

Robin's tactic was usually to try to engage and keep the person talking until she either wore them down or they went away. It's a pretty common tactic and we'd seen it before, so we only repeated that she needed to leave.

When her stalling didn't work, Robin got angry. She walked all her belongings across the street to the place we had run her off from before. The farther away she got, the louder and more scathing her invective grew. Calling my ethnically Vietnamese wife a mail-order bride from across the street, but descending to sad invocations against fate as she walked back to get more of her things.

We've grown a thick skin about these things, and know that for her it's not necessarily even personal but just a reaction to the cruelty and indifference to her misfortune that our country and city show her. 

We show it too, but we also know from experience that letting them camp on our property opens the door to open drug use and everything else.