
We used to live in a little red house in the middle of a crowded block. Our little house was small and our little yard was tidy. It was perfectly symmetrical with matching paned-glass windows and shutters with anchors carved out of the fronts. It didn't have many plants in its garden. In fact, except for a dogwood tree in the front and a maple tree in the back, it had almost no plants at all. It was a proper little house, made even more proper by the rows of boxwoods and matching window boxes we added to the front. We built a rock wall alongside the sidewalk and we added a cedar fence around the backyard to keep our little bunnies safe. Our little red house was our shelter from life's storms. I loved that house.
Eventually, we said goodbye to our little red house and the dream we once had for it. I remember the day we loaded up the last of our moving boxes. I remember seeing the house as its tidy, symmetrical, proper little self and finally realizing how out of place it was. How out of place we were all along. And that made me feel better about leaving it.
I drove by the old house recently and I was shocked to see how much it had changed. It was still painted red and it still had its cute black shutters but almost everything else was different. The cedar fence was pushed wide open, the boxwoods were gone, the window boxes were missing, and the plants on top of the rock wall had all but disappeared. Instead of the simple symmetry I always thought it needed, the new gardener had used a decidedly more asymmetrical approach. There were plants in places I never thought of putting them—including a vegetable plot in the parkway. I saw the work of someone who wanted to wipe the palette clean of its former self. To wipe it clean of me. But instead of feeling incredulous that two people could look at one plot of land so differently, I saw that our little red house was finally settling in to itself—that it finally looked like it belonged. And I realized that the new owners were surely settling into the neighborhood more than we ever did, and that made me very happy.
I only wish we'd taken some of the old boxwoods with us when we left.
ANY