A neighbor has taken to lying in the road.
This is the second time in two days I’ve caught her doing that. It’s unnerving.
I saw her while I was clearing my fence lines. Been using my 12″ chainsaw and two loppers, perfect for the job. It’s unbelievable how many feet tiny saplings grow in one year, how thick junk bushes are (and where did they come from, assholes), invading yards and yards into my fields. And those twenty and thirty-foot-long wild grapevines that claw through trees, four and five-inch thick vines I can’t pull out even when I use the weight of my entire body, hanging and falling like a crazed puppet.
Because of a year or so of loss, I left too much undone, I bought into a false narrative of old age, a paralysis, a seeming devastation. The grapevines and more have flourished rabidly, and now I’m facing what I’ve let happen and what must be done to make it right again with a little chainsaw, a DR brush mower, two aforementioned loppers, 5 (seriously, five) burn piles, two different – sized wheelbarrows, my Wolf rake, and diesel gas.
[Because I can’t pull-start the DR, I stop men in pickup trucks to do it for me.]
Back to the neighbor lying in the road. Her feet were in the ditch but her torso and head were flat on the tarmac. I asked her if she was alright and she said she was just resting. She got up and finished walking back to her house.
Maybe now that she knows I can see her, she’ll stop doing it. In almost 40 years, we’ve not had a friendship, not uncommon around here, but it turns out she had a secret garden, the one her husband dug up with his tractor (she said she told him to) and threw across to the creek, those almost dead plants I gathered up as much as I could to save, beautiful, expensive plants I couldn’t have afforded to indulge in. Why did she throw it all away?
This is how yesterday ended: when the sun went down, and the birds were singing their last songs and I couldn’t see clearly enough to keep on cutting, I looked up at the sky, and it was all the colors of masses of tropical flowers. The air was colder but still soft. Suddenly, nothing hurt. Suddenly, nothing mattered so much. Suddenly, I remembered happiness.
I called the dogs, but they were far into a place I couldn’t go in the coming dark, barking furiously at something that was safe from them, so I went inside by myself, drank a full glass of water and some red wine. Before I went to bed I took my hair down and bits of trees and bushes and grapevine fell on the bathroom floor, and I went to bed laughing, dogs finally in, and read ‘The History Of The World’ by Andrew Marr until sleep.
