Gone Pilfering

Within a few hours of moving into the dead lady’s house, it becomes apparent that our neighbors pilfered the dead lady’s garden. Which is now our garden, as of April 25th, the day after my thirtieth birthday. 

We viewed the house in February when we were both crammed into my little flat in Edinburgh and eager for air that didn’t smell of chippy. I had nothing to add on whether or not we should go for it. Other than, “The garden looks well established.” No one else wanted it, so my boyfriend with his full-time job and meager savings got a good price. I have no money; we’re not married. 

The house sits in a commuter village of 2,000 people, was built in the ‘80s and not renovated since. It’s surrounded on three sides with garden, the house like a gulf. Previously owned by one woman only, June, who died in the living room, which faces out, eye-level, onto the street and the nice view of commercial farmland, the pylon, and a shutdown mine. June’s garden that is now, in April, choked with weeds and riddled with angry bald spots where things must’ve sat. 

We take our first neighborhood stroll. There, in the garden of a little brick A-frame, sits what looks like cousins of our moss-covered, mostly broken hedgehog sculpture. Ours is on guard next to a twiggy mint infestation. We go another few houses down, obviously snooping now, and in a slabbed-over front garden sit ten small-to-large pots designed in the same muted earth tones and leafy patterns of the broken pots we’d found that morning in the garage. The trail is hot!

Day two, and we get a visit from Christine and Collin, a cute 60-somethings couple with ‘80s perms. 

“Don’t pull up anything!” Christine tells me. “If we would’ve known you were a gardener!” They ask how I came to be here, and I make a joke about being too sweaty for Virginia and bagging a hot Scottish guy. 

“Really, though,” I say, “Scottish people are a lot like Southern people.” Warm, generous gossipers. A type of generosity I feel far removed from since living in the city and working freelance for a living. Marx on the bookshelf, panicking over a few pots that I have no claim over. 

There’s a twenty-year-old Japanese maple in the front garden. The soil underneath it is covered in moss. “Keep your eye on that one,” says Christine. “It’s coveted!” Which brings an image of waking up to a crater in the front garden, a few stray red leaves left behind in the flurry to relocate the plant to a more deserving neighbor. 

So, I get out there with gloves, a trowel and a bucket, digging up the moss and replacing it with fresh manure. I stand back and look around at the ten or so visible windows into neighboring homes as a way to show them I care, please don’t steal June’s beautiful tree. 

I look at quotes for fences. 

Then, it’s a confused trot of items carried over by what seems like directionally-challenged ants: 

• A bird feeder.

• A massive neon blue IKEA bag with a rhubarb plant shoved inside, developed and leafing. The root ball is about the same size as the vacant vegetable patch it sits two inches away from.

• Five plastic seed trays arrive in the garage, which has a built-in lock with a key we can’t find, so it remains perpetually open. 

• When we go into town for square sausage, a hand rake with a moldy handle arrives in an otherwise empty mouldy trough. 

• Fifty-seven pots.

• I tell someone, “I love beans.” Six butter bean plants in neat plastic cups arrive along the back fence.

Christine comes over while we’re ripping up ‘80s wool carpet. 

“I took care of her for six years,” she says. “Her carers wouldn’t give her whiskey, but if she ate some of the food I brought, I’d give her a tipple. Cleaned up after her, too. Couldn’t control her bowels much, in the end.” I give Christine a rhubarb crumble.

A few more half-rotten pieces of machinery arrive in the garage later that night. A set of sheers and extendable bush trimmers with the handles rusted off.

Two months into the house, and we’ve got no flooring. We ran out of money. We keep finding waste-like stains in corners of closets. 

I think everything missing that could possibly return has been returned. 

I’ve started with pies. I smile at everyone, which here isn’t so American. 

The only house in the neighborhood without a fence. On top of the mound with a nice view of red clay turned over by people digging and pulling, looking and scraping along. The earth giving freely (or not) of its resources.