There You Are

The neighbors are one thing she is having problems with. They walk onto her property and look at the plants that grow by her house. They’ll even go in her backyard without asking. In her mind what they are doing is lurking. Lurking, lurching, thieving, would be words she would use to describe their activity.

One thing she would want to impress upon you is that they have carpet on their front lawn in summer, and she’s seen the woman put clippings into the ground without growing roots first. They have had carpet on the lawn that they have carved out a place for the fire hydrant that’s how serious and permanent this carpet is. When there hasn’t been carpet there has been sheets of black plastic. Exactly the plastic of black gallon garbage bags but flat, laid out, stapled with stakes like camping forks at the edges where the sidewalk starts.

This woman and the men—maybe they are her sons—spend hours outside every day in summer bending to the ground very attentively, disagreeing with one another, and digging shallow holes in the earth they uncover with just a fold over of the black plastic like it’s some sort of blanket that they will then cover over the clippings again when they are dead because they always, and always will, fail to grow.

She knows the old woman takes clippings from her plants, and there is always some younger man with her with a bucket or a bigger clipper when she comes onto her lawn. Last time, one young man had a clipper with a long handle and he leaned from her lawn across the fence with these clippers to the neighbor on the other side of her and took a whole limb with him.

He had explained once if he doesn’t answer her sometimes it’s because he has ear plugs in, but she isn’t sure about any of this or what she has even managed to say out loud.

She knows what she thinks. She doesn’t want to be reminded.

She would describe them physically as fragile and old worldly, as she can imagine them as ghosts on a dairy farm that was decimated in decades past. Their hair comes wildly out of their intense skulls. They lift the carpet or the black plastic and plant the cuttings that haven’t rooted in ground they’ve packed hard down and have done so for every year of her eight years living two doors down. They are really trying.

It is a kind of madness; a theater of deep care and attention and utterly incorrect and they keep going, very invested, every year. She has seen them on their hands and knees removing small stones when there’s been the tiniest whisper of new grass. They spend hours every day on this ten by twelve foot patch of lawn most days in summer.

She used to be able to cross the street, but there is a dog who lives across the street now who has attacked her dog, so she can’t turn there.

It’s as if no one understands what she has done or is trying to do in this neighborhood, which is to disappear completely.

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Kayla Blatchley lives in Syracuse, NY.