Arrival

taking root

It is spring again. The fifth one here.

They are out again, tending the covers over their flower bulbs, which they sell after harvest. He checks the weather every day and lays down tarps to protect them from the freeze. He and his wife are a dour pair, not in the way of American Gothic charm.

Let me tell you how they first presented themselves to me when I arrived in this strange southern place.

The day I looked at the house in October of 2021, she came over in a pink sweatshirt printed with the word Bible across the front and a smile. Light gray hair, probably once blonde. Petite. There was a strange energetic caul over her face so that I could never quite remember what she looked like.

Her face seemed to shift in a way I could not place. I noticed it from the beginning but overlooked it in favor of impending neighborliness.

She said I looked like a nice lady. She hoped I would buy the house. She stood beside me and the realtor longer than was comfortable, her presence distracting while I tried to take in the place. I had already placed the house under contract, giving myself time to secure financing.

The houses around me were dilapidated, scabbed together, in need of renovation. Yards full of junk. Porches stacked with junk. Usable junk perhaps. Necessary junk.

It was an unkempt place, a struggling place. But there was a cemetery across the way.

I found that strangely comforting.

The quiet ones.

I went back to California, packed my things, and arranged for the move. The deal on the house was not yet done.

Once I moved in, they were over nearly every day.

One afternoon I had the hood of my car up. He walked across the grass and leaned in under the hood, taking hold of the leads of my disconnected battery.

I had taken it apart without quite knowing what I was doing, but I was learning. YouTube could teach me enough to be safe.

His hands were shaky. He did not quite address me. His manner was wooden. Piercing brown eyes, a hawk nose, long hair pulled back with a receding hairline, balding on top. Thin and wiry. A leftover hippie look.

They always seemed to find a reason to come over.

The first night I moved in he brought a milk heater. The gas company had not yet turned the heat on. It was nineteen degrees when I arrived that November.

In the dark I wondered how he knew what I needed. Later I would understand that nothing happened on this street without being noticed. I walked the delicate line of being neighborly.

Nothing was overtly hostile, but their constant presence never carried the ease of simple helpfulness.

She brought a little beef stew and some chocolate candies. She told me she would help me with my garden.

Gardening was not my first priority. I had moved into a house in November that needed management and an overgrown yard.

She befriended me on social media and began messaging. Profiles of neighborhood sex offenders. Stories about the dump, which had been a big problem in the area. I had lived in Staten Island, where that problem had also existed, eventually becoming a park.

I saw the city I moved to with different eyes from its inhabitants. I saw potential. A place that might soon be filled with homeowners not native to the area.

They spoke instead of city council failures. Lost revenue. Meth houses. The people in the gray house who were supposedly a known problem.

I never had a problem with the people in the gray house.

The texts kept coming.

When I brought brownies, she left them outside. Later she texted: Oh, the ants got them.

When I closed on the house in March, my kitchen ceiling poured rainwater during a storm. Later months, I spent the day on the roof once the rain stopped, hauling up tarps, bricks, and concrete blocks to hold them down while I tried to locate the leak.

Roofers came and took one look at me, a woman of a certain age who was not from here, and quoted prices that had no relationship to labor or materials.

At the end of that day he came over.

He said the first roofer had known what he was doing.

I later realized he had been listening from behind the trellised wall of his porch while I spoke with the man. At the end of my long workday, after I had hauled a tarp onto the roof myself, he came over and explained how he would do the job.

He would charge me $1,500. I had to pretend to not notice what I noticed.

Then his tone shifted after I asked a question about construction.

“Well, I’m not going to tell you everything,” he said. “I worked hard for that knowledge. I’m not giving it away for free.”

He had stepped onto my property unsolicited and was now yelling at me that I didn’t know what I was doing.

He was right. I didn’t know what I was doing.

But I am allowed to learn. My name is on the deed.

He muttered angrily about having things to do.

I told him to go home and do them.

That was the end of neighborliness.

After that, loud music and low-frequency vibration became a constant presence on the street for several years.

The true point of arrival came years later. A settled feeling. And clarity.

It is spring again.

The fifth one here.

The tarps go down over the bulbs as they always have.

But the land they watch is no longer theirs to manage.

A place where every movement had once been noticed, commented on, interpreted.

It’s now without the constant interruption of people who meant no good.

Spring arrives again.

My fifth one here.

More rooted than before.