Down in my little beach town, I used to share a property line with an old lady. Six years ago, I asked her to split the cost of a solid fence between properties. She refused, saying she didn’t need a fence. I had an escape dog, so I needed it and paid for it.
A year later, I asked her to trim her ivy that had grown up two of her oak trees along our shared fence ( that I bought) and had choked them out. The ivy was higher than my single-story house. She refused because she liked the green.
In December she let her grandson put up a carport for her car so that he could park his vintage car in her garage. I discovered it when I came down after Chirstmas, the gray plastic my new view out of five of my southern windows.
Then she passed away at 101. The next time I came down, I looked at those vines and decided to take matters into my own hands. I cut and cut, making a small hole for daylight where the two trees of vines had grown into one giant clump. I put the cuttings in my own yard waste can.
The next time I came down, two weeks later, my neighbor got involved. I told him I’d pay him. Between us, we spent six hours or so cutting vines as high as we could reach on a ladder. I told myself it was payback for the light-stealing plastic carport. We filled up three green cans (two borrowed) of yard waste.
The paid neighbor agreed to prop up my bottle brush plant along the fence, which was falling over due to no light because of the vines. A winter storm was predicted for Sunday, so I left Saturday morning, made it back to the Bay Area and was too pooped to go out. I missed a book-exchange girl party and a night of dancing in a COVID-y bar.
Sunday morning, as the storm raged, my neighbor called me to tell me that the deceased woman’s daughter had sent over her gardener on Saturday to cut down those two vine-choked trees. By then, I’d already paid my neighbor $200, including an hour fixing my garbage disposal and ten minutes fixing the frame to my flower bed, which the neighbor on the opposite side had run over with her car, trying to get around her other car with the dead battery, which sat in the middle of our shared driveway.
It’s an ongoing circus of a neighborhood. The woman across the way told me that the upholstered chair I’d given her instead of donating it had been destroyed by her two cats and she put it out for the landfill. Between the ruined chair, the ruined flower bed and the ugly carport, I have to admit that things keep changing on my beachy street, some for the better, some not. The new house across the way has a black metal roof, which is sure to rust two blocks from the ocean. But what do I know?
The universe is laughing at me, or is it Karma, or something else? At any rate, I now have some of my sunlight back on the south side of my house, so important on a foggy gray day. I can’t wait to go down there and see how it looks.
In the end, I can chalk it up to therapy. There’s nothing like venting by ripping out ivy.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 