I had approximately three to four minutes to move the carcass from my yard into my neighbors’ yard so my sister would think it was their dead person. But, ever the optimist, I decided to hope against hope and resuscitate him with the power of fright.
“Young man,” I commanded loudly, as I stood over him and the kingdom of the ants. “Young man! Are you all right?”
While there was no outward response, I realized that he absolutely had to be alive; his knees were still bent, his feet flat on the ground, and again, citing my Law & Order training, I knew he certainly hadn’t been there long enough for rig (shop talk for “rigor mortis,” FYI) to set in. And as far as the phrasing is concerned, I frankly have no idea where within me “young man” came from, except that I suppose nothing terrifies a young vagrant as much as an old lady armed with a cane and a cordless phone that has the cops on speed dial.
But he didn’t budge. He didn’t flinch. An ant sauntered across his nose.
“Young man!” I attempted again. “Who should I call for you? Should I call your caseworker, should I call your sponsor, or should I call your parole officer?”
The ant traipsed around the rim of the left nostril, then wandered over toward the right one.
“… because I can just as easily call the police,” I added. “And their number is shorter.”
And who knew that those words were so magic that they could roll a boulder away from the mouth of a cave and the dead would suddenly awaken.
“Whuuuut?” the kid mumbled, raising himself from the dead as his eyes fluttered open despite the swarm of insects establishing a colony on them.
“I asked you if you needed me to call your parole officer or the police,” I clarified. “Because it appears you may be in some form of distress.”
Now, it’s true and I will be the first to admit that there have been times in my life in the not-too-distant past when I have woken up in strange places—like on a friend’s bathroom floor, where I landed after I fell off the potty and horked on the wall during the way down the night before my college graduation ceremony because I got too friendly with a bottle named Jack. However, I never, ever, ever decided that someone’s yard looked like a very good place to lie down in broad daylight after I had been up for five days while smoking meth out of a pipe with a crust of battery acid on it.
“No, I’m fine,” he barely spit out as he finally rubbed his eyes. “I’m good.”
“If you’re so good, why are you unconscious in my grass?” I demanded, towering over him, my hands on my hips.
Two minutes and counting.
“I’m not,” he said—still, I might add, lying down. “I’m cool. I was just walking down the street and it looked like a good spot.”
“A good spot?” I asked. “A good spot for what?”
“To sleep,” he said, almost as if I was stupid for not figuring it out.
“Well, you need to get up,” I informed him. “You need to be on your way.”
“Why?” he asked incredulously.
“Because you can’t sleep in my yard,” I explained firmly.
“Really? Why not? It’s just grass. Grass belongs to everybody,” he shot back in a very snotty tone, as if the problem was me, as if the issue was that I thought I was just too good to have a random tweaker, after being awake for the better part of a month, collapse in my yard on his way to the bus station, drool in my grass, and let my bugs crawl in and out of his orifices while he slipped into an exhaustion coma—all as my sister took pictures and immediately emailed them to my mother while she was attending to her duties as a Eucharistic minister at church.
“That is so funny, because I didn’t get your contribution this month to pay for the fertilizer, water, or the guys to come and mow the People’s Grass,” I informed him. “This is private property, which means, in People’s Terms, ‘not yours.’ ”
“Maybe I’m not done sleeping,” he replied.
“Well, if I call the police, they have this amazing wake-up toy that will solve that problem,” I reminded him. “It’s called a Taser.”
That made him sit up.
“So who do you want me to call?” I asked again. “Your caseworker, parole officer, or the police?”
“I’m getting up,” he said, and he shot me a dirty look with his tiny pinhole pupil eyes as he wobbled to his feet. “I’ll find another place.”
“Not on this block you won’t,” I said with a shake of my head. “Two streets down there are trashy people who have had a couch on their curb for three months now. It’s the People’s Couch. Go sleep there.”
“You should chill out, Grass Lady,” he said, as walked down the street with the legs of a newborn calf.
“Oh yeah?” I said, leveling the field, and then quickly added, as if my mother was whispering in my ear through an earbud, “I can call the police if you don’t feel okay! ’Cause you don’t look okay! Mister!”
“I’m okay!” he yelled back, and gave me a very discourteous wave of the hand.
“I know you’re on drugs!” I yelled. “I can tell! Normal people don’t collapse in strange yards and fall asleep! You should try doing that in the woods in Germany in a witch’s front yard and see what happens to you! You’re lucky you didn’t wake up in a cauldron! Because I have one!”
Then I realized that it is never a good idea to piss off a drug addict whose rationalization skills aren’t as sharp as they could be, even though I seriously doubted Hansel could find his way back to my house with a handheld GPS he had just stolen from someone’s car. And my cauldron isn’t really that big, by the way, only big enough to dump a two-pound bag of Hershey’s Miniatures in it and leave it on the front porch for some Type 2 teen dressed as a Dungeon and a Dragon to pillage on Halloween.
So even though I’d successfully chased the carcass out of my yard months before, his bony crystal-meth face was the first one I thought of when I ran down the list of possible suspects who might have nabbed my trees. Actually, it wasn’t a list; there was just one entry, called “Hansel.” But when I really thought about things, I ruled him out: You can’t sell trees at a pawnshop, and his muscle-atrophied arms of string cheese probably would have pulled right out of their sockets like a boiled chicken’s had he tried to use them for anything except putting a test tube up to his lips and flicking a lighter.
I, however, was still struck by the insidiousness of the treenapping and was examining the crime scene when I heard someone walk up behind me.
“That is just terrible,” I heard my neighbor Gloria’s voice say as I turned around. “And they were in full bloom. Terrible time to uproot a tree.”
“I can’t believe anyone would steal trees,” I said, dumbfounded.
“There was a rash of plant robberies last year on the next street,” she informed me. “We thought the worst was over. This is clearly bringing it all back.”
I was puzzled. “I never heard anything about that,” I said, surprised. “When was the last theft?”
“In the fall,” Gloria told me, and I nodded.
“No one wants a tree that’s going bald,” I surmised. “But who doesn’t want a tree with a healthy headful of purple hair? I think the plant bandit has rebloomed.”
“Did you follow the trail?” Gloria asked, motioning toward the sidewalk.
“There’s a trail?” I said, getting immediately excited, to which Gloria pointed.
“Right there on the sidewalk. It’s not much, but it is dirt, and it leads right up the hill,” she confirmed.
And sure enough, there was a line of soil—admittedly not a direct line, but a clump here, a splash there, definitely soil that had fallen from something being hauled up the street, which amazed me. The perpetrator was so brazen that there wasn’t even a getaway car or an escape wheelbarrow. The whole exit strategy involved pretty much nothing but one asshole dragging two trees by the neck up a hill. And I guess that in a place like Eugene, where I routinely have to wait for a person lumbering on stilts or carrying a ferret
in a BabyBjörn to cross the street before I can make a left or right turn, not much fills the definition of “out of the ordinary”; a guy only hauling two trees with fresh dirt still clinging to the roots could have feasibly been the mayor or someone elected to the city council.
“I’m going to follow that trail,” I told Gloria, and I did just that, stomping my way up the hill, guided by a patch of black soil here and there. Gloria followed close behind and pointed out the trail when I became stumped several times. I finally stopped when there was no more dirt to be seen and the clues abruptly dried up in front of a house that was in need of a weed whacker and a paint job. In Eugene, that’s a sign that whoever lives inside does own a cauldron. Full-size.
And that is right where my plan of action came to an abrupt halt. I looked at the house and didn’t really know where to go from there. Did I knock on the door and ask if they had seen my trees? Did I call the police and attempt to press charges because the dirt stopped in front of their house? Did I try to peek in their windows to see if I spotted any fallen purple leaves? I didn’t have any proof, I didn’t have a description, and I didn’t even have a picture of my trees to prove they were mine in the first place.
I was standing on the sidewalk with Gloria when I heard a familiar voice call out my name. It was Roy, our realtor and friend, who lived a block or two up the hill with his wife, Patti, who’d sold us our house. He was just starting his daily bike ride when he saw us, slowed to a stop, and asked me how I was.
When I told him about the theft, his jaw dropped and he said he was sorry to hear it. I explained why we were in front of this particular house and why I didn’t exactly feel confident about taking the investigation any further.
“Those azalea trees were beautiful,” he said, shaking his head. “They were in full bloom. I had heard that there was a plant pirate in the neighborhood last year, but I thought that was all over.”
“This is clearly bringing it all back,” Gloria repeated.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said, shrugging and feeling generally powerless. “I guess I’ll just have to buy two more trees.”
“The nursery has some pretty ones,” Roy told me. “I was there this weekend and saw a couple. They’ll run you about a hundred, hundred twenty apiece.”
I was stunned. When we bought the house, the trees were a package deal with the foundation and the roof, which said to me that it was too much of a hassle for even the people who paid $120 per tree to take them.
“You’re kidding,” I said dismally. “So I guess I could replace the trees for two hundred forty dollars, only to have them stolen again? I’m not made of money! In fact, even if I put a cheap little shrub in there, who’s to say that won’t get stolen, too?”
At that moment, I decided to take a stand.
“No,” I said to Roy and Gloria. “I won’t be a supplier for someone too cheap to buy their own plants. I’m not going to put anything back in the pots. I’m making a point. I have a message to send! Whoever stole my plants walks down this hill and up this hill every single day. They looked at those trees and waited until they were in their prime to abduct them, and they’re waiting for me to replant them so they can pillage my porch again. And I’m not going to play that game. On the way up the hill, they’re going to have to look at what they’ve done, and they’re going to see it again on the way down the hill. Empty pots. Nothing but empty pots. I’m making a statement! I can’t afford to keep feeding some evil person’s tree habit!”
And honestly I was very happy with my decision, even though after about a week or so Gloria came over to ask what I thought I might replant in them, as did almost every neighbor on the block, even ones I hadn’t met yet. Every time I wandered outside, someone popped over or came running across the street, anxious to know what I was planning on planting in the empty pots. It almost seemed as though I was creating more of a disturbance than the person who ripped my trees off in the first place.
“I was thinking,” my neighbor Sue said as she caught me outside weeding what I loosely term the “flower bed,” “that maybe some nice hydrangeas would look just perfect in those pots.”
“Well, I do think you’re right, but I’m going to leave them empty,” I tried to explain. “I’m making a statement to whoever stole them.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Sue said, nodding. “Gloria mentioned that you couldn’t afford to replace them.”
“That’s not exactly what I said,” I started, but Sue had already begun to walk away.
“Petunias can be nice,” she said over her shoulder. “They’re not expensive, but they are awfully common.…”
Still, I stuck to my guns and steadfastly refused to replant anything. The pots stayed empty for a long, long, long time. I definitely wanted the goblin who thought they could help themselves to my foliage to know that the stock had been depleted and their crime spree was over, at least in my yard.
Then, one day in almost fall, I went outside to pick up the paper and, lo and behold, there were two bushes freshly planted, one in each pot. And there was not a drop of soil on the ground. Again, in the dead of night, someone had snuck up to my porch this time delicately placing two deep-green shrubs with brilliant red berries on either side of my door.
It was now the third weird thing that had happened in my yard.
I pressed each of the neighbors, particularly Sue and Gloria, and all of them denied it, although by the looks on their faces, the relief had been as long coming as if the empty pots were equivalent to not only a People’s Couch in my front yard but a People’s TV, which is also down the street.
The good deed went unclaimed. I questioned friends, Dave the mailman, Eva my UPS lady, and still no one would fess up.
Until one day my husband and I decided to wander downtown and go to a food fair, and we weren’t there five minutes before we ran into Roy.
“Hey, how are you two?” Roy greeted us jovially, and then pointed at me. “What’s all over you? Was there an ash cloud that just swept through here?”
“Oh,” my husband laughed, swatting at my hair. “I think it’s powdered sugar.”
“Every time I bite the funnel cake, it touches my head,” I said, trying to explain and pretending to be horrified at the size of my fair food snack.
“I heard about the shrub shanghai,” Roy said sympathetically to my husband. “That was unbelievable.”
“What’s even weirder is that a couple of weeks ago, in the dead of night, a little plant fairy brought us some bushes back,” I added. “We just woke up one morning and there they were! Personally, I think it was one of our neighbors who was distressed over the disgrace of the empty pots and was afraid the zoning police were going to switch us to the zip code of the neighborhood that doesn’t bring their trash bins back in.”
Roy smiled. “Well, there might be a plant fairy that lives up the hill somewhere and always has a spade in her back pocket, ready to do good deeds. But I’m not saying if I know for sure or not.”
“Has anybody who lives at your house been to Home Depot lately?” I asked Roy, trying to see him around my funnel cake.
He just grinned.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he said cryptically, but I knew in that smile that somewhere up the hill, in the form of a spade and a tarp, the good had outdone the bad.
You Give Me Jellyfish Fever
“Nicholas, run! Run!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, trying to shout over the deafening crash of the surf hitting the beach as I watched him about to get swallowed by a huge wave.
As evidenced by my screaming on the beach like a demon, our vacation with my nephew had not turned out quite as planned. My husband and I were terrible, terrible substitute parents. When I originally had the idea of bringing Nick up to visit us for a couple of days before my sister and the rest of her family flew up, I had nothing but charming and delightful reveries in my head, and now it was looking like the reality couldn’t be laughably further from those trite little dreams.
It’s true: Many years ago I assessed the impact of propagating my family’s genome even further and quickly withdrew my nomination for motherhood in the general best interest of the world, because I knew I could never guarantee that the hand reaching out and grabbing your leg from the middle of a department store clothing rack wouldn’t belong to my child and I get very angry if someone else has helped themselves to my snack food. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t have a wonderful time with my nephew as we took him to the redwoods to have the vacation of a lifetime. He was almost twelve, and the window of him still wanting to be in the same room with us was about to quickly close; soon, I knew, he would communicate solely through grunts as he discovered, layer by layer, how uncool we were. He had a bag of Chex Mix with his name labeled on it and I had mine, and as long as our hands stayed in the respective bags, everything was fine for the time being. We packed the car up and headed south to the California border, but not before Nick asked if we could stop at the bookstore so he could read a book during the car ride, since he had already finished the one he brought. I beamed with pride.
We stocked up on reading material for all of us, and five hours later the trees got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until we reached a sign that informed us that we had, indeed, reached our destination.
If you’ve never been to the redwoods, all I can say is that it really has to be one of the most spectacular places on earth; it’s majestic, amazing—every superlative fits. Tree trunks as big as houses, sunlight streaming through branches, and the subtle quiet and absolute stillness blend as wisps of fog rise and roll together to form a place unlike any I’ve ever been to before.