The Neglected House Across the Street on the Dead End

I start this week with a new morning routine. Rain or shine, I go outside with my coffee; the phone remains inside and upstairs. I listen to the many birds that find our yard attractive. I hear cars heading to work, but after a while they just sound like rhythmic crashing waves and become soothing. This is the first time, as I soon turn 71, that I too am not headed to some kind of work.

The birds really love the farthest stretch of our backyard, where it gently slopes down to a marsh and the nature preserve. They seem to enjoy the bed of bearded iris, the wisteria vine and the pink and terra cotta vintage geranium we’ve planted behind Calvin’s tool shed. I call the geranium vintage because it looks like an old-fashioned flower. The birds feast on the worms found in the rich soil nurtured by the food scraps, coffee grinds and avocado skins that we bury so they may become compost for next year’s gardens.

I learn so much these past few months. I experience a profound shift where I truly embrace our house and property. I take stewardship. Even though we have lived here for three years, this is the first time I move from an apartment renter mindset and take on the role of homeowner. I have responsibility for things I never had before, gutters, furnaces, roofs and hot water heaters. I find out you must inspect your house and property regularly to prevent costly things from occurring. Fortunately, our house, built in 1912, only had one major issue - a cracked clay water pipe. The pipe, laid down at the time the house was built, lasted quite a few years. Thankfully, there was no damage and our homeowner’s policy covers the cost of repair.

I learn about pH levels in the soil, how to measure how fertile it is, and what combinations of compost, Plant Tone and peat moss make for healthy plants. I can identify most of the native plants found along our perimeter and down our back slope, as well as the pests and fungus that visit my climbing roses and ornamental bushes. I help my boxwoods recover from winter stress and now know what I must do in the fall to protect them.

In both my house and garden, I move beyond just accepting what’s on the surface to identifying the bones of the house and how to keep them healthy so they may continue to hold up our dwelling. I’m knowledgeable about things like overwintering and the activity that occurs under the ground deep below its surface. I’ve found when you focus exclusively on the outside appearance of things, it is frequently accompanied by neglect of the inside. I don’t wait this year until my roses bloom and then fret because their leaves are getting chewed up; I look diligently for the small black lines that move amongst the leaves and pick them off or use the hose to spray them off and treat with Neem oil. We do the much harder work of maintaining a property in a completely organic and natural way. When my roses do bloom, their lush green leaves will enhance their beauty even more.

There is a house across the street on the other side of our dead end. When we first moved in, an eccentric but friendly couple who were younger than us but looked much older occupied it. They did not have the physical or financial wherewithal to keep up the house and the yard. Or even take care of their health. It was rather sad, but there was evidence of some minimal care. Perhaps a year after we lived here, the woman, the owner of the house, passed away unexpectedly, and the man left soon after to join his son in Ohio. Her family cleaned out the house and despite its down at the heels condition, put it on the market for a crazy sum and sold it quickly. After a month or two, the new owner appeared and my neighbors and us were happy to see dead trees being cut down and removed, a new roof put on and the crumbling front stoop taken down and a new one put in. And then, nothing.

It’s been at least 6 months since the owner has re-appeared and, in that time, windstorms took down big sections of a dilapidated fence, the plastic covering on a broken window has blown away, the garage roof is caving in. Through the now open sections of the fence, we can see knotweed growing in large clumps all over the property, striking fear in our heart when they flower in June and become airborne. We have successfully, after a three-year battle, mitigated the knotweed on our property. This involved the use of tarps, constant cutting of stalks, digging up rhizomes bigger than Calvin’s thigh, pulling small new plants before they could root and grow. Native plants, vines and marsh grass have reclaimed their former territory, and while we will always have to keep on it, we feel proud of what we have achieved organically, without the use of the recommended panacea, shooting Round Up into the rhizomes.

I find myself enraged by the neglect of this property across the street. Our engagement with our home and property and the changes we have made, has not stemmed from a concern about its re-sale value but from our experience of living in it and talking about the life we want to live and how the house and yard can help support this. So that is not the worry. A re-sale value approach to changes you make or how you care for your home is transactional and somehow to us, commodifies our home, something we want to experience as a living part of us. That grows with us, that in the best scenario is the site of our death.

While this neglected property may cause some concern, my extreme affect about it seems very out of proportion. Today, as I sit here listening to the birds, reflecting without the company of a phone, I come to grips with the fact that my anger is displaced. I am angry at myself for being neglectful. That in this transition time, moving here from there in so many ways, I have neglected my own body and my emotional health. In this in-between time, I experience the decline and death of my mother, the birth and care of an infant grandson, the writing and publishing of a book, the end of a long and deeply meaningful career as a social worker and the end of a decade where I was me/not me and definitely focused far too much on the outside, my appearance and my phone.

The mood swings I experience reflect the state of a psyche that has been neglected underneath all this busyness and loss. I’ve not used the tools I’ve learned in past therapeutic encounters or in my own clinical training to take my temperature, to be in touch and to do the positive things that I know will keep me steady and even. Coffee and sweets are not efficient mood regulators. I let go of a daily yoga practice that kept my body strong, flexible and in balance. My body responds to this neglect with 25 pounds of extra weight, neck pain and pain around my knee. I do the short-term fix of going to physical therapy, something that will only be helpful unless I continue to do the work when it ends. I’ve treated my body and mind like I’ve been a renter and don’t have to do a damn thing to keep them maintained and working properly. It’s time to become their homeowner again. To become their attentive and caring steward.

These thoughts come unbidden in the natural world I sit in this morning. Perhaps the birds are whispering in my ear. I sit on a rusted, yet beautifully filigreed garden bench we got at a flea market under a canopy of green leaves that hang low from a tree. To my left is the statue of the Blessed Mother Mary we vowed we would keep if we got this house within our budget. She needs a good cleaning and some flowering shade plantings. Perhaps next May, I will make her a flower crown. This is where I come to find my mother. Perhaps she is here today in the gentle breeze that lifts a lock of my hair.

But today, as insight blossoms like my glorious rhododendron bushes finally have this week, I will finish my coffee, do some yoga, have berries, Greek yoghurt and walnuts for breakfast, and then see how the day may unfold. Tomorrow I’ll make green tea to bring outside instead. But I will come out and just as I walk around my house and garden to see what needs maintaining and attention, I’ll do the same to myself. Perhaps if I continue to do these things, I’ll stop being so angry at the neglected house across the street on the dead end.