Growing Pains

In the last trimester, Jack has decided to go au natural.

Enlisting the assistance of Craigslist, she's hired Ms. Pauline. On an otherwise, sunny, and ordinary Wednesday that I hoped to spend peaceably away from the job, I was summoned to the backyard by Juno’s ferocious barks. On inspection, I found on the other side of the sliding glass door a pert, put-together woman who identified herself as Jack’s new gardener.

The yard is sprouting with new plants and flowers. I since have learned that Pauline is a lovely woman of a certain age who has retired from the corporate rat race and now finds pleasure in answering ads and planting things like corn and sunflowers in our Westside ghetto. I’m not sure if I was snarling, but from across the glass she smiled and called me by name and identified herself. I did not know her from Adam, but she knew about me being Jack’s daughter-in-law, and Juno being a shelter dog and all. In an appropriate gesture of peace, she pointed to the dog friendly snail bait on the table outside the door that she’d recently purchased on Jack’s behalf and asked me if Jack had cleared its application with me.


In the same green wave, Jack staged a revolt about the front lawn. I’ve always shared the same dismay over husband’s resolution to stifle the lawn. The truth I possess. He has never allowed any lawn under his control to live. He believes lawns to be the devil’s work.


But, he’s maintained a good cover the last three years because the sprinklers were broken when we moved in. When Jack announced that the summer brown lawns were no longer happening on her watch, he pulled the broken sprinkler card. Jack threw down and called Danny, her forever fix-it man. Twenty-three hundred dollars later, the original copper and steel pipes were looted from the stack on our driveway, and replaced by PVC underground. The lawn’s life, now controlled by nightly automatic sprinklers, had a new green lease.


Husband, who was able to get away with bi-monthly mowing of the dead lawn, was unceremoniously divested of that last job. Jack found a way to hire the felon who used to tend to the front yard before we moved to LA. I imagine he’s going to supplement the $25 a month she pays him now with whatever he can salvage when we are at the gym.

The old lady, through her proxy Pauline is spending like it’s growing on trees, but who am I to complain? On reflection, it’s better spent than on the fast food slalom of months past. I remain numb to it all. I sleep quite well. Only two nights ago, sound asleep, I groggily awoke to a single bark from Juno. Husband jumped up; the noise. He circled the yard. Within minutes he told me to get up and follow him. In the front yard, the two-story tree had crashed westward into the neighbor’s car and carport.


Could it have been the new sprinklers?