I’ve been sort of absent from OS the past couple of weeks.  It’s a matter of things piling up that interrupted my momentum.  The Norwegian and I went to Memphis during the last weekend in March to celebrate our first anniversary.   Then I got sick for several days, which didn’t help.  In the middle of all of that, the Norwegian uttered a sentence that spun me into a frenzy of domesticity, something that hardly ever happens. 

He said, “I hate the back yard. I want to pay someone to fix it up.” 

Every spare moment since then I have spent designing, planning, spraying the backyard with lines of spray paint. .  I can’t stop playing with Sketch Up .  I have the materials all figured out:  decking, Ozark fieldstone flower beds, gray Arkansas flagstone stepping stone walkways.  I’m going to plant Paw Paw trees, Jack-in-the-pulpit for a wet shady spot, some native Arkansas sedges and wildflowers for butterflies.  

 This is my first chance to actually transform something I own into something I like.  It’s also the first chance I’ve had to fulfill a dream I’ve had for years: to grow a vegetable garden.  I’ve grown exactly one garden in my life, during college.  I tore up the front yard of my rental house, despite warnings from the owners not to, and grew melons, tomatoes, and peppers.  I had such a bumper crop that year that I decided I must be good at it.  

And then I moved off, again, to another rental house where I couldn’t get away with turning the front lawn into my personal farm.  I spent years after gardening nowhere but in my head.   I made lists of native plants I like (because what would grow best here but what is native here, yes?), decided I wanted to grow my veggies in boxes,  I quietly imagined what I’d do if I ever got my own piece of land.  I wasted months of my life daydreaming about gardens, if you add it all up. 

I always wanted a useful garden, an edible garden.  I want to be able to walk into my back yard during the right months and pick a meal.  I want to grow strange varieties of tomatoes, pick my own muscadines for jelly, and crush up my own fresh basil.   In my head, it’s already Southern Living style masterpiece.  

Now that I actually have the chance to make it all happen, the first thing I want to do is put up some privacy fence.  We can’t afford to fence the entire back yard, but I’m really sick of looking at my neighbors’ yards. I’m also paranoid.  The lady behind us keeps a nice yard, but I’m pretty sure she spies on me regularly (and therefore must hate me. I do sometimes walk through my kitchen with nothing on but a smile). 

The house to our left is a disaster.  There’s always some kind of drama going on over there, and so the yard is completely neglected.  They mowed it once last summer.  The guy to our right keeps everything mowed and orderly, but he creeps me out a little.  He’s one of those guys that look like he’d call the cops on you if your flag accidently touched the ground.  I’m always wondering what he’s thinking when he finds me out there smoking a cigarette in my pajama bottoms and bathrobe.  

I sit there and wonder if I ought to wave or to flip the guy off, just to be snarky about it.  It is my little piece of land, after all.  I will smoke on it if I want to, by god.  And if I do it wearing a bathrobe, well that’s my right as an American citizen. 

Still, I get the sense that I’m the weird neighbor that they talk about.  I imagine their voices sometimes: “Why don’t they do something about that basset hound howling every time there’s a tornado siren test?  Why don’t they move that green truck with the North Dakota license plates before a tree falls on it during tornado season? What the hell does that girl do for a living?  She keeps the weirdest hours. Why does she stay up to three in the morning all the time?”  

Maybe it’s because I grew up in the country, but something just doesn’t seem right to me about being able to actually see my neighbors hanging out in their back yards.  It is indeed a fact that when I was eleven years old, I regularly stripped down to my underwear and ran around outside in the pouring rain.  We lived in a huge house on a hill, at least a quarter mile from the nearest neighbor.  No one was going to be annoyed by a half-naked kid doing rain dances in the front yard out there because no one was there to see it.  

Here, we live in little tract houses built in the 1960’s.  Our place is 1200 square feet, with a four foot chain link fence around the backyard.  Almost no one has a landscaped back yard and hardly anyone has a privacy fence.  Plenty of people still hang out in their back yards, though.  Creepy guy to the right of us is always out there working on some project.   The neighbor to the left has a teenage kid that regularly comes out to the yard, picks up a rake while he surveys the damage before him, and sighs before he gives up and goes back inside.   

 I want a wall of wood or trees between me and the neighbors. Only then will I feel comfortable actually buying those Paw Paw trees and putting them in the ground.  I am convinced, like Frost said, that those bits of good fence will instantly improve the neighborhood dynamic.