(DNYUZ) – It sounded like popcorn warming in a microwave: sporadic bursts that quickened, gradually, to an arrhythmic clatter. “There it is,” Mary McKee said, staring out the front door of her home in Arlington, Va., on a recent afternoon.
McKee, 43, a conference planner, moved to the neighborhood in 2005 and for the next decade and a half enjoyed a mostly tranquil existence. Then came the pickleball players.
She gestured across the street to the Walter Reed Community Center, less than 100 feet from her yard, where a group of players, the first of the day, had started rallying on a repurposed tennis court. More arrived in short order, spreading out until there were six games going at once. Together they produced an hourslong ticktock cacophony that has become the unwanted soundtrack of the lives of McKee and her neighbors.
