The morning dawned vibrant, perfectly bright. The sky was bluer than blue and the grass was greener than green– just as it should be in Bright Week.
We had a houseful of rich food from my cooking way too much for Easter dinner. We were all reasonably healthy except that I had caught a slight cold at the Easter vigil. We still had the car I’d borrowed for Holy Week– not roadworthy on the freeway, but still able to putter up and down Steubenville as long as I gave it a long rest between trips. Nothing was terribly wrong, except that I was terribly anxious.
I just get that way sometimes. It’s part of having PCOS which causes OCD and anxiety, and it’s part of having PTSD from the stalking neighbor, who we haven’t seen since January. The anxiety had been down, and then it came back. It always does.
Fears swirled in my head. Electric bill is due tomorrow and we don’t have it. Rent is due the fifteenth and we have half of it. The landlord gave us an extra week last month and I never want to ask for an extra week again. Taxes are due in one week and we have none of them. Will the IRS put you in jail if you owe a few hundred dollars a few weeks late? The car is still not fixed and I don’t know when the neighbors need the borrowed one back. We can’t fix the car without a part that costs at least 200 used. What if I can’t get Adrienne to soccer? What if God hates me and I’m going to hell?
I went downstairs and ate a glorious brunch of holiday leftovers: lamb and ham and scalloped cauliflower and cheesecake. It felt like the last meal before an execution.
I did my writing for the day, and I had grim enough things to write about.
I went for a walk, but the head cold made me exhausted.
I decided to go to the backyard, where I could pull weeds sitting down.
I have mentioned that my yard is another anxiety trigger, because of the old struggles with our next door neighbor. She especially hated the fact that I like to garden, and would redouble her harassment if she saw me doing it. But I wanted to at least reclaim the old strawberry patch this year, and maybe plant some zucchini. I can still do everything else at the community garden. I am tired of neglecting my yard.
I ripped out handfuls of harbinger-of-spring and threw them on what used to be the compost heap. It’s now a patch of especially fertile bright grass at that odd corner between the porch and the wall.
I grabbed a dandelion plant at just the right angle, and I yanked and twisted until I had a taproot in my hand. If you don’t garden regularly, I can’t describe how satisfying it is to yank a whole dandelion. Then I yanked another one, but got it wrong, and milky sap welled up in what was left of the root.
Jimmy who lives down the block, the one I didn’t know was a mechanic, came by with his mower just then. His preschool-aged son followed him, diligently pushing a plastic mower.
The boy happily uncovered Adrienne’s old disused green turtle sandbox. There was still sand and toys inside.
“There’s spiders in here!” he commented, rubbing his sandy hands on his bright yellow shirt. “Radioactive spiders. If it bites me I’ll be a superhero!”
Adrienne used to be terribly fond of superheroes. She is too grown up for them now. I miss that age so much it hurts. For just a minute, my grief felt deeper than my anxiety. And then, somehow, I felt happy.
“Let’s make a castle for the radioactive spiders to live in,” I said, scooping the sand into a bucket.
The boy liked that idea. We made big towers of sand and little mounds of sand. I showed him how to make a door and a window for the sand castle by digging a dent in the tower. Then we used a spade to dig a sunken road from one tower to the other. As we dug, we chatted.
“Do you like strawberries?”
“Yes.”
“Those are strawberry plants inside the fence. And when they grow up, you’re welcome to come and eat them fresh. You can visit any time and keep my sandbox company and eat strawberries.”
Adrienne came out with the shovel without being asked, and started to turn over the compost. “I guess you’ll be needing me for garden chores this year?” she joked.
When the boy got tired of the sand box, he asked to see the guinea pig. I brought Lady McFluff out to sit on my lap and sniff dandelions while the boy petted her soft fur.
His father pushed the mower back and forth across the neighbor’s lawn first. It’s so odd to see that lawn looking shaggy. She used to stim back and forth across the same patch of grass for hours twice a week, cursing to herself, mowing it so low that it died. Now it’s gotten unkempt. The grass is high in places and the ornamental bench is knocked over. The red-shouldered hawk made a kill on her lawn a few days ago, and the poor pigeon’s down feathers were still entangled in the weeds.
Jimmy mowed her grass to just the right length, not too short. I looked up instinctively for her to come out, but she didn’t.
I can’t even describe for you the neighbor’s fury when we mowed our lawn. She would film us with her tablet, pacing back and forth on “her” side of the boundary line, screaming that she was going to get us SWATted and have Adrienne taken away by social services. She would babble that she’d seen us running onto her porch in the middle of the night and that she’d told the sheriff we were a brothel– an endless spout of conspiracy theories and abuse. When we finished, she would sit on her back porch and curse under her breath as Adrienne played outside. And when she thought we weren’t looking, she would empty her own lawnmower bag of clippings on our porch. Toward the end, she escalated to assaulting Michael and shoving him into the wall when she saw him with the weed whacker. Once she used her tablet to film my shocked face as she called me names and lifted her miniskirt to flash her panties at me. The police kept telling us it was our job to de-escalate. But if we tried to de-escalate by just neglecting the lawn, they gave us a ticket for the weeds.
It got so bad that the sound of a mower would make my heart race.
But my heart didn’t race as the little boy sat with me, patting the guinea pig, watching his father mow.
I stayed perfectly calm as Jimmy went back and forth over our messy, wildflower-strewn yard.
The neighbor’s yard had smelled like crushed grass, but when he mowed ours, we got other smells– onion grass, clover, the bitter scent of crushed Creeping Charley.
When it was over, he and the boy collected their mowers and left.
I found myself sitting in a neatly mowed yard, in front of a garden, snuggling a guinea pig, with no fear of assault or harassment.
My brain started the litany again. Electric bill! Taxes! Rent! What if you never get to order that engine harness? What if you never get the car fixed? What if God hates you and you go to hell? But they were swirling more quietly now.
I can go in my yard without panic.
Terrible situations can come to an end, somehow: even ones that lasted for years and seemed as if they’d never end.
Maybe there are such things as miracles after all.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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