Twice now, I've been out in my front yard, and passing neighbors have asked me about whether or not I'm living in this house. The one I've been living in for over three years now.
The first time, I was evicting a juicy black spider and her nest from her brand new inappropriate home in our mailbox. A couple was walking by on the sidewalk, and the woman asked me, "Are you living here now?" I told her I was, and she said she was so glad. She also said something about the prior owners losing the house, which indicated to me that she was quite confused, as we bought the house from the previous owners, though the house next door was lost to foreclosure when the owners couldn't pay their mortgage.
Sadly, that is a frequent reality these days, especially in Michigan.
Today, as I was kneeling in the front flower bed, cleaning out weeds, an older woman walked by. She had been walking when I was mowing what Daniel and I hopefully refer to as our "lawn," which is right now mostly dry grass and mole hills, peppered with bare patches. We're working on it. These things take time. The woman smirked at me as I mowed because the mower was turning up a storm of dry dirt. I ignored her, and she was apparently on her second pass when she asked me if I lived here now. I told her I've lived here for three years, and she said, "I thought the house was empty."
I'm baffled by this assumption that our home has been empty, that nobody has been living in it. I admit, Daniel and I are not obsessed with our yard looking like a putting green like the last owners were. They spent $400+ per quarter watering the lawn. We don't spend anywhere near that. We aren't out in the planting beds constantly, weeding and planting and watering and tending. We're just not that kind of couple. We mow when the yard needs it, usually once every ten days or so, and we're in the process now of getting some professional help with the damn moles that are prolific, persistent, and probably responsible for the lack of decent grass.
They've been here, in fact, as long as we have, but we only noticed the back yard was riddled with the ridges that indicate their underground pathways, and we didn't know those were evidence of moles. We thought the ground was uneven for different reasons.
We also don't decorate for the holidays. Mainly, that's because of the hassle involved. We don't do the yard art for Hallowe'en or lights on every available surface for Yule. The interior of our home is usually decorated for the holiday season, and there's been a tree in the window two of the three years we've celebrated here. But lights outside? In the freezing temperatures of December? With all that ice and snow everywhere?
Not the cup of preferred tea for these homeowners.
But the property doesn't look bad, and it doesn't look completely untended. I guess, because the previous owners took so much extra care to make their lawn lush and green, to keep everything perfectly trimmed, to plant flowers that bloom in succession throughout the Summer, to never allow wild plants like Michigan's Queen Anne's Lace to get a foothold, some of the neighbors got used to a certain look to this house. And with us taking only the basic care of the yard we can with the time we wish to spend on it, it just doesn't look the same.
Today, I spent several hours working in the yard. It has never been my favorite set of chores, though lately I feel like that's changing. I finished weeding the flower bed, preparing it for...whatever happens next. I trimmed the little bushes that are climbing all over the boundary rocks. I dug up an errant frond from a rose bush that hasn't produced blooms since the first year we were here. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled around the driveway, getting rid of the merry little weeds that sprouted up in the cracks in the cement, and I spent the rest of energy and stamina trimming a very overgrown hedge that, technically, is our neighbors' responsibility, but they're used to us taking care of it, so I began that seemingly endless chore.
Maybe the thing that people are noticing is what I've sometimes felt in this house, that it's not quite mine, even though it certainly is my name and Daniel's on the mortgage. Not long ago, Daniel removed a cabinet from our utility room and took off some doors to a storage area to make it more easily accessible. It felt, at first, like we needed permission from someone, like we were merely tenants. Maybe it has to do with how much Daniel and I have moved around since we got married, and now that we've been in this house for three years, the longest we've lived in any home together yet, we are starting to sink some roots and make this place our own.
I hope my feeling this way doesn't mean it's time to move again...
Copyright 2009 Melissa LaFavers