The lady next door has died.

To her grave, she takes her fierce intelligence and her unsparing judgments of those of us she leaves behind.

With her death, she deprives a neighborhood of one of its central characters: its scold and its conscience.

She lived next door to me, but she also lives on every city block, in every suburban subdivision, in every small town.

The Lady Next Door was leery when the young couple with two obstreperous boys and a wailing baby moved into the wreck of a house behind her back fence. She had hoped for a family with the means to clean up the place overnight. What she got, instead, was repair and renovation on the installment plan.

The Lady Next Door was a master of indirection. Upon return from a weekend trip, she would gaze across the fence: "Is it my imagination or did that forsythia have a growth spurt while we were away?" (Translation: "Trim your hedges.")

"I know how hard it is to find workman in a new town. I've taken the liberty of making a list for you. Our painters' names are at the top." (Translation: "Paint your garage.")

She was attracted and repelled by the chaos on our side of the cedar stockade. Boys batting softballs into her gutters, kicking soccer balls into her front yard and, on their retrieval missions, snapping branches off her ornamental shrubs.

The Lady Next Door endured in silence a noise level that was often cacophonous. Barking dogs. Screaming infants. But she did not hesitate to reprimand the culprits if salty language from a soccer scrimmage carried to the screened porch where she entertained on warm afternoons from April through October.

Chances for good relations looked especially bleak when she traced a sneaker imprint in her well-tended flower bed to the foot of her new, 3-year-old neighbor. He shrank from her withering glare, but he watched his step thereafter.

The children took their cues from their mother, who never, ever called The Lady Next Door by her first name. There was in her manner the sense of absolute authority she must have projected when she was a mathematics teacher so many years ago.

The children sensed it, too, becoming uncharacteristically polite in her presence. The Lady Next Door was grown up in a way that their own parents were not. She provided a model of adult behavior and expectations only hinted at in their own household.

She wagged her finger but she gave them gifts they are now too young to appreciate -- the soothing strains of Chopin through an open window on mild nights, the rickety clack of a hand mower across the grass on Sunday mornings.

Long after they have forgotten the face of The Lady Next Door, they will remember those sounds of summer, how much more gracious they were than the thump of rock music and the sputter of the gas-powered lawn mower in their own backyard.

They will remember that the first seedling in their first garden was a gift handed across the back fence.

They will remember the smiley faces she took to drawing on their wayward kickballs before tossing them back.

The Lady Next Door was a snow bird with a reverse migratory pattern. She flew home each December for the holidays. Christmas in the desert was unthinkable for her, a Canadian native.

Six months ago, she came home from her winter retreat in an ambulance.

In one of life's cruel ironies, her hospital bed in the front parlor sat opposite the piano she could no longer play. The stroke had rendered The Lady Next Door speechless, a condition that never beset her in life.

She had opinions about everything and everyone. She was especially confused, as older accomplished women often are, by the laments of younger women about the burdens of juggling a career and a home.

Hadn't she juggled, too, at a time when there was little enough tolerance for women with careers and none at all for career women who complained?

Through the summer, her husband pushed her wheelchair around the block, letting her drink in the familiar sights of a life that was slipping away. It was awkward to meet them. She had so much to say and, suddenly, no way to say it.

The other morning, the hearse came for The Lady Next Door. We had been expecting it, but were saddened nonetheless.

Our sadness was tinged with relief. We had raked the yard the day before. All was in good order for the last trip through the neighborhood of The Lady Next Door.