Love thy neighbor

The frenzy of moving day dawns with all the typical sweat and confusion. Gather the family members who have no choice but to help. Call the good friend with the pickup. Have Dad borrow a freight truck and driver from work. Create a strategy. Meet at the self-storage shed where your life is stowed. Coffee and military precision.

By sunset, the back is sore. You guzzle a beer and grin at the fallout. It has been a struggle to find an affordable house in a good neighborhood. This is it. It’s yours. Or at least the bank is letting you live there.

No more itinerant living at the in-law’s. They’re decent folks, but you need your own place.

The summer heat browned the lawn during escrow when ownership of the property seemed up for grabs. The woman who had lived here hand-watered the entire lot. I had already come up with plans for tearing up a section of lawn and installing a drip system.

Inside of our first week in the new home, a letter arrives: “To Whom It May Concern, We don’t know if you are the owners or renting the house at …. But it would be greatly appreciated if you would start taking care of the lawn. As you can see everyone takes great pride in his or her yards. Thank you, Concerned Neighbors.”

Perhaps this concerned neighbor understood that if he or she were to sign a name to the snotty little epistle, I would have egged the person’s automobile at midnight. My wife told me to rise above. I couldn’t. Suspicion stole precious hours of sleep, or minutes at least. Was it that health nut adrenaline junkie who runs everywhere? Or maybe the fat guy with the stupid fishing cap? Or was it a “she"? Maybe the woman who offered me coffee only yesterday? She had seemed so friendly. Now there were doubts.

My first stop was next door, one door south.

An old woman answered, looking ragged out, just off the couch in her bathrobe. I apologized, but she insisted I come in. She had been out of town for her father’s funeral. Otherwise, she would have been able to welcome us to the neighborhood. Lucille, my neighbor, must have been in her 70s. Her father’s longevity amazed me, although I didn’t ask his age. She was a retired art teacher who had grown up in Tonopah. Her own work as a sumi-e artist, a Japanese style, had slowed in recent years. Her health didn’t appear in top form. I regretted the pettiness of my mission. She touched her cigarette to her lips in a delicate gesture. I doubted this fragile lady could be the letter writer, but she saw that I had come with some object in mind, and in hand. Finally, I held out the letter, saying, “This came in our mail yesterday.”

Her rheumy eyes ran over the letter, her nostrils twitching.

“Shit-bitch!” she pronounced a single word.

I couldn’t keep from laughing.

We became friends, or at least friendly, after that. Her eyes turned mischievous and she said, “I know who wrote it, but I won’t tell you.” Usually as adamant as a rock star looking for his next fix, I somehow submitted to her judgment. We talked about other things.

She joked with my wife about the letter, saying we should post it streetside along with a picture of one of those perfect yards clipped from a magazine. She admired our dogs and complimented us on our daughter. We heard about her daughter, a successful government policy analyst who lived in Australia. We were glad when we saw Lucille outdoors enjoying the weather.

My hunt for the letter writer inevitably waned. Every once in a while I would receive a clue. One day I heard a neighbor across the street yell at a speeding car, “Slow down, asshole!” I grinned. Couldn’t be her, I figured. Too forthright. No, the letter writer was a coward. Over the course of a year, random clues appeared. It couldn’t be either of them because so-and-so had said such-and-such. I took unnatural, over-the-top pride in maintaining our lawn, a misguided effort to shame the letter writer into confession. “It was I,” an imaginary confessor pled for my forgiveness, “and now I realize how nice you really are and how well you maintain your lawn, and I am dreadfully ashamed of my behavior.” The sun beat a little too hard on my noggin.

An ambulance appeared in front of Lucille’s house one day this past autumn. Paramedics moved her on a stretcher, an oxygen mask cupping her face. I phoned a relative of hers and found out she was OK. It was a scheduled hospital visit.

Another day a taxi honked for Lucille. I ran over and heard her speaking on the telephone. “Yes, tell the driver he has to come up and get me. Wait, never mind.” Her loose skin stretched into a smile, and I felt like a neighbor helping her down the steps and across the immaculate lawn.

Everyone knows how the story ends. Lucille waited for her daughter to return from Australia, then she decided to let go. She was buried with her family in Tonopah.

So I write in praise of the anonymous letter writer who pushed me to meet Lucille before she died. I enjoyed her company. Reno is a fractured city, a place that fosters isolation instead of community. Whether on crowded or spacious lots, we live alone, each family unto itself.

The men walk across her driveway. They have come with pickups and trailers to haul away the last of her things. The new owner will rent the house. This disappoints me. Renters don’t take care of their yards. Lucille had a beautiful yard, raised flowerbeds and a recess for the stone Madonna. But if the grass begins to die off, I know what to do. I will write a snippy note and sign it, "Concerned Neighbor." And maybe I will be truly concerned about my neighbor, the actual person, and not just the green grass.