Community Development

I maintain a narrow view and inhale the dust. This just isn’t working.

A few days before, I was complaining to my neighbor, Kevin: Where is all this pond sludge coming from?

“I thought you were digging a pond over there by your bird feeder?”

“This, what you’re doing here,” Kevin had said, pointing to me where I stood with fish swimming about my knees, “looks a lot like maintenance. I don’t want to do maintenance.”

“What do you want, Kevin?” I can’t remember what he wanted.

The origin of the sludge, however, I recall him suggesting was the dust. A car drove by, followed by a white and brown cloud that wasn’t exhaust. “Every time that happens, it ends up in your pond.” Dirt and rock settled in a layer on the patio furniture.

A truck, laden with fifteen cubic yards of gravel, labors forward and back behind me. I smell the diesel as a skid loader bounces over toward the truck; I hear the clang of steel and voices. It takes the same amount of maintenance to have a pond and read beside it as it does to have a pond and sit reading in the coffee shop. I’m debating.

Last summer, people stopped by. I got to know my neighbors. “Digging a pond?” they would say as I leaned on my shovel, “Planting flowers?” as I took them out of their flats. They said these things as they walked by, when there was somewhere to walk. I think it showed that I was one of them; everybody planted something, except the ones that were already leaving when they signed the lease. Chatting in the front yard was neighborly, and working there made it a neighborhood.

As the gravel pours into the street behind me I put down my book and go for a beer. It’s too early, really, but it’s kind of my ‘fuck you’ to the workers whose fault it really isn’t that they are still mucking around in the devastation that is my neighborhood’s roads, lawns, and sidewalks. I take a long, slow drink and squint into the haze. One of them looks back and wonders just briefly what I’m up to before going back to work on a backhoe like a child who didn’t want to grow up so grew his Tonka toys to keep pace with him.

As I drink, I look at the flower bed between my two trees in the front yard. It’s scraggly at best. I want to want to do something about it, plant something, weed something, give a damn. This is only the bed’s second year, too early to get tired of it and quit, and lots of the perennials and some of the new bulbs are thriving. Annuals are non-existent. The view just beyond the bed explains why: mud and the ruins of the edges of my yard. It’s a story long in the unfolding.

One day, I asked a galoot with a camera if I could help him. “Just taking before and after pictures,” he told me. “Before and after what?” I asked, somewhat concerned as my yard was the subject of his work. It turned out that the next day the work would begin. The sidewalks were to be uprooted, the roots of the tree on the corner of my lot maliciously cut out on two sides, a cavernous trench dug by a machine that tore down overhead branches, the water main replaced, gas pipes run, smaller trenches across the yard, grass ground into the ground, bulldozers and backhoes and bobcats, oh my. Then they would replace the entire street. This was in May. “Six weeks start to finish,” the oaf had said. Done before my birthday party. The galoot is the city engineer. When first he and I spoke he had had his job one day.

The city owns a grotesque portion of my yard, past the inside edge of the sidewalks on both sides. When they want to replace the pipes underneath, it seems they can. Or, at least start to before getting tired and leaving. As the rear hatch of the dump truck slams shut, the coffee shop is sounding better and better.

Mud. Dirt. You’d think that this would be the stuff of organic inspiration. It’s not. It’s four months of a disheartening mess. It’s a summer of looking the other way and pretending something growing is all that’s going on behind me. It’s tracking in on the floors. It’s nowhere to study and nobody to invite over to share the outdoor living space. It's no visible neighbors. It ain’t too god damned much like a garden.