Jumping to Conclusions

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"
-Jane Austen

In recent weeks new neighbours have moved in above us. To the pleasant surprise of Spouse and I, despite the presence of two children in the family, they are for the most part considerably quiet.
That was an unexpected turn: the previous tenants, who also had two children, would quite literally cause the building to shake and rattle when they climbed the stairs or when they so much as stepped across their apartment, and we presumed the same of the next people.
On occasion they would stamp so hard that I would instantly be drained of whatever creative inspiration I had been possessed of, and my muse, disturbed, would flutter away for more peaceful pastures.
It was devastating to endure such daily commotion and it is difficult to address one's neighbours about such matters as it might well have provoked the matter into more serious levels had we done so.
Many a time I commented to Spouse, "it sounds like the children are jumping off the table!"
or "I'm sure they're dragging the furniture around the room!"
But none of that made any sense at all. Children do not jump off tables on a regular basis; they might try it once but certainly sensible parents would put a stop to it.
Some weeks after the family moved away Spouse and I went down to the back of our apartment complex to dispose of some rubbish at the dumpster.
"Look," said I, "isn't that familiar?"
Covered in beetles, morning dew and long grass, I spied what looked to be our miniature trampoline. We had said goodbye to it last November in a clean sweep of our apartment, in a whimsy of frantic cleaning, and it had been duly dispatched to the dumpster. Indeed it had soon disappeared and we reasonably assumed that it had been hauled away with everything else.
Spouse and I looked at one another then and all the light dawned on us. Those neighbours had been using our very own trampoline to fill our precious hours with noise, had turned our own once-prized possession against us and had generated a good deal of frustration and in the end, had left it, abandoned, for the next new neighbours to discover and maintain the cycle.
One would hope that the grass grows rapidly over what is left of the trampoline and that it is never seen- or heard- again.
I am glad to have more dormant neighbours this time. I ought not to have presumed otherwise until they had settled in.