My neighbor raked a tiny portion of my yard and now I am left to wonder the meaning and implications of that action.
Was it just her trying to do something nice for us? Was she confused? Was she trying to send a (very ambiguous and ultimately not understood) message?
I don't know.
But I do know that it spoiled one of the small pleasures I took in life, that being my ability, on Saturday afternoons, to watch the squirrels dive for chocolate chip cookie bits in the pile of leaves that was on the back porch.
And it did that, took away that small pleasure, for some not-yet-understood reason that makes me think I might be in danger of getting kicked out of the neighborhood, that maybe my longstanding plan of being next-to-worst is not working any longer.
The leaves were on my porch to be raked because I didn't rake the leaves in my yard this year, but I have an excuse. I have two excuses, or maybe three, actually. The first, and real, excuse is: I'm lazy. That's the honest truth. I didn't rake the leaves because I'm lazy and I don't want to.
But I tell people that I didn't rake the leaves because, well, because of fate. I was going to, I tell them, one Saturday in October. I was going to rake the leaves beginning Saturdays in October, getting ahead of the game, but then The Boy's team made the high school football playoffs and the first playoff game was on a Saturday, so we went there, and so I didn't rake the leaves. Then I shrug and say After that, it rained or I was busy on Saturdays.
See? Fate. Fate also probably intervened on Sundays and weekdays, keeping me from raking the leaves those days, too. So far, nobody has been impolite enough to ask about fate's role on the non-Saturdays during which leaves also existed and laid on my lawn.
The third, secret reason I have for not raking the leaves is the reason I only so far have told to Sweetie, who was skeptical of its genius but really it is genius, and it is no less genius, and no less a reason because I came up with it only after deciding that I wouldn't rake the leaves this fall. My third, secret reason for not raking the leaves is this: Because I am highly efficient.
It's true.
Here's how: Leaves fall beginning about, I don't know, always, on our property. They are always falling, from the moment they appear on the trees that surround our house and make insurers charge us a lot of money because the trees might fall on our house and they continue falling until the dead of winter, when sometimes I will look out onto the white expanse of new-fallen snow and see a pile of leaves that dropped off the trees the night before. There are about 11 months a year in which leaves fall off the trees around our house and onto the yard around our house.
The sole month in which leaves do not fall is March. That's when the trees are regrouping, building up energy to produce, again, the 1.5 jillion tons of leaves that they will drop for the next eleven months. During the month of March, all of the previous year's leaves have fallen and new ones have not yet formed, so I decided, this year (after deciding that I was not going to rake, anyway) that I would rake one time per year. In March. That way, I don't have to go out 2, 3, 4 times -- and I don't have to make excuses for not going out 2, 3, or 4 times-- to rake the leaves.
See? Efficient. And noble, probably, since my stance probably reduces greenhouse gases or increases mulch (whatever mulch is) or something else that I'm pretty sure the Sierra Club would approve of.
My neighbors, though, or at least one neighbor, does not seem to approve of this plan, something I learned about only because the kids happened to see what has to be the oddest case of reverse-vandalism ever.
We were eating dinner last week when Middle broke the news to me:
"Sally," Middle said-- Sally is the neighbor -- "Raked off the porch."
"What?" I asked.
"She came over and raked off the back porch." Middle said.
I looked out the window, for some reason, which was pointless because I could not see the porch or Sally or Sally's house, since it was dark out and the window I could look out did not look at the porch or Sally or Sally's house.
"Why would she do that?" I asked. Middle shrugged. I asked it again, in case this time she had an answer, but she didn't, still.
So it remains unanswered: Why would my neighbor rake my porch? And only my porch. Not the rest of the yard, not the driveway, not the backyard. Just the porch that stands off of our kitchen. There's no reason for her to do that. While our yards are side-by-side and share a border, there is a thick hedge between our porch and her yard, a hedge that blocks and collects most of the leaves that might otherwise wander into her yard; the porch is, in effect, the only place in our yard from which leaves could not get into her yard.
That hedge means, too, that Sally had to have really worked at this. She had to have walked a lengthy way through our yard from one end or the other of the hedge. She had to leave her yard and walk around ours for a while to get to the porch, then rake just the leaves off of the porch somehow away from the porch while not putting them anywhere else in our yard, but getting them to her yard, through some way that I didn't know.
I questioned Middle further and she said she had seen Sally raking our porch but then had gone to watch TV. That's kids for you. They'll see someone trespassing in our yard, raking away at the porch, and they'll just blithely wander off to watch Gossip Girls. Whereas I would have asked the interloper to also do the driveway. I was kind of worried about Middle's attitude. What if Middle came home and people were, say, removing furniture from the house, or digging a hole in the backyard. Would she bother to inquire? Or just go up to her room and close the door? I was afraid to ask.
I checked the next day, when it was light, and Middle was right. Sally had raked our porch, and only our porch. On either side of the porch, where the walkway around the house leaves the porch, there were piles of leaves that were unchanged and the same depth as all around the rest of the house (knee deep, almost!) but on the porch, there were only a few hours' worth of leaf accumulation. She'd cleared the porch without even disturbing the leaves in the rest of the yard.
The clearing was not a favor to me, anymore than it was when Sally accused me of vandalism. We've been next-door neighbors will Sally since moving in, and have enjoyed generally good relations with her, relations marked mostly by the exact kind of interactions I want with my neighbors: she waves to us, we wave to her. Her dog walks into our yard, we let it. Our cat walks into her yard, she lets it. That's what being neighbors is all about, in my book: Live and let live, without all that tedious "socializing" and "interaction."
That changed slightly when Sally approached me one day while I was working in the yard. I didn't know she was approaching me, because I was listening to my iPod and mowing the lawn. I turned off the lawn mower and turned around and whoop, there she was. I took my headphones off and said "Hi,", and she said:
"You sure listen to that loud. You shouldn't listen to your music so loud."
Mind you, I was listening to my music on headphones. In my yard. Which she was standing in. Also, she should have said loudly, I'm pretty sure.
I said, though, "So, what brings you over here?"
She pointed at a bush in front of her house and said "Did you chop down my bush?"
Now, I had seen her bush being chopped down, by guys who came by in a city truck and mowed off the top half of her bush because the top half of her bush was blocking the top half of the No Parking sign in her yard. I hadn't tried to stop them because it wasn't any of my business; it wasn't like they were raking my porch or anything. I also hadn't gone to tell Sally about the bush-hacking because... well, because I don't like talking to people and talking to neighbors is just asking for trouble; one minute you're talking to your neighbor and the next thing you know, they know you've got satellite TV and they invite themselves over to watch football and you can't watch the game in your pajamas anymore.
So I told Sally, when she confronted me, that No, I had not chopped down her bush and explained that I'd seen the city people come by and do that and she should contact them, maybe, and ask them about it. She listened to that and then said:
"Well, I just came home and saw it was chopped in half and I thought maybe you had done that."
We had lived in our house for a few years, by that point, and had waved to Sally lots of times. I wondered, as she talked (and now), which of those waves, exactly, gave you the impression that I am a bush-chopping weirdo trespasser?
But maybe I shouldn't have been offended that my neighbor, who so often I'd waved jauntily to, thinks I'm the kind of nutjob that just goes onto people's property and chops down people's bushes, since my neighbor turns out to be the kind of person who doesn't tolerate people having porches covered in leaves, and thinks nothing of rectifying that situation, even if the situation does not need rectifying, even if, say, the situation is fine with the porch-owner because the porch owner has hatched a secret third plan to only rake one time per year and doesn't mind the leaves on his porch because of that secret third plan.
And even if the porch-owner also likes the leaves because they keep the porch from showing all the chocolate chip cookie bits and Froot Loops and potato chips and crackers that get tossed out onto the porch when the porch-owner cleans up after his twins, things the porch-owner tosses out onto the porch because he wants the squirrels to be able to find them so that the squirrels remain well-fed, since the porch-owner no longer bothers to fill the bird feeder that the squirrels used to get their meals from, something the porch-owner no longer does because the porch-owner is, in a word, lazy.
Sally also was neighborly on another occasion. After then night that Sweetie and I and the Babies! had spent in a hotel because a falling branch had knocked out the power to our house, Sally met us at the end of her driveway when we took the twins for a walk.
"I saw the power line knock out power to your house," she said.
"Yes," Sweetie said. "We had to spend the night in a hotel."
"Oh, that's too bad," Sally said, and then went on to add "You didn't have to do that. You could have stayed in my basement, for as long as you needed to."
I am still not sure what to make of that offer. Maybe Sally still secretly thought I had cut down the bush, and therefore would only offer, at best, to put us up in the basement, whereas a non-bush-marauder might get to stay on the first level of her home? Maybe she'd been stealing leaves from us for years, and has them stored around her house everywhere except the basement, so that if she allowed us into her house we'd recognize it, look around the house and say "Hey, wait a minute... these leaves look VERY familiar."
The offer to stay in our neighbor's basement, having been only made in retrospect, did not need to be acted on, though, other than to pray we never had to take he
r up on it. Although maybe it would not be made again. Maybe that's the secret message of raking our porch: We've broken the neighborhood code, a code-breaking that is best signified (and punished?) by raking our porch off, a code-breaking that would remove us from the select group of people who, although still not totally cleared of suspicion in Bushgate, would have been welcome to stay in her basement but are no longer in such elite company.I don't know.
And I'm not going to worry about it anymore today. I'll think about the meaning of it all. In March.
No comments:
Post a Comment