It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [47]
Frankly, I don’t know what other reaction you could possibly have once you realize two trees have been stolen from your yard.
The two trees, on either side of my porch in enormous pots, were gone. Simply gone. As in not there. The enormous pots were still there, but the trees themselves—two beautiful azaleas with fuchsia-colored flowers that had just exploded into bloom—were no longer planted in them.
I stood there and stared at the porch, speechless, looking for the trees. Because as anyone who’s had anything stolen from them will tell you, the first reaction you will have when you discover your thing is gone is that you will look for it. As in, “Certainly my eyes deceive me. Humanity cannot be so depraved that someone would thieve up to my front porch in the dead of night and steal two trees from my yard. I have overlooked them taking a break from being potted trees and they are in lawn chairs sunning themselves on the north side of the yard, because I’m sure it’s frustrating to be a tree and never be able to go anywhere, suffering from Restless Trunk Syndrome.”
And no matter how many times you’ve been stolen from, the reaction is always the same: disbelief. Complete and overwhelming shock to the point that if you go out to the street and your car has been stolen, if there is a fire hydrant within the general vicinity, you will look behind it. Because you cannot believe it. Getting robbed, it seems, never gets old.
As it turns out, this isn’t the first time that I’ve had live goods plucked from within inches of my front door. I’m actually a veteran of plant crime. On Mother’s Day a few years ago, some asshole waddled up to his mother’s house with a ceramic pot full of pincushion flowers and Miracle-Gro potting soil that I had purchased from Home Depot merely eighteen hours before. It hadn’t even cleared my bank account yet when D. B. Cooper jumped off my front steps holding my planter, scurried to his getaway car—which, remarkably, wasn’t registered to me—and showed the jackal who bore him that although he couldn’t be bothered to stop in at Walgreens to get a friggin’ card and a stuffed animal, a son’s love is always worth making a rap sheet a couple of lines longer.
That morning, I even looked behind the folding chair I also had on the porch for the twenty-pound pot of flowers, just in case I had misplaced it.
But you know what? There’s no misplacing trees. I mean, you can gasp and shake your head all you want, but you’ll never find your tree under a paper towel on the coffee table or behind a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t like they were hiding in the mailbox or stuffed behind a solar light.
When I finally recovered enough to speak, I yelled to my husband to come outside quickly, and when he did and I explained what had happened, the first thing he did was look for them, too.
“The trees?” he said, his eyes darting from corner to corner. “They took the trees? Are you sure? How does someone steal trees? They were as big as you. They were as tall as you are!”
And then, since I’d had extensive and thorough detective training because Law & Order was Nana’s favorite show, I began to search for clues. Yet, oddly enough, there weren’t any.
“This is creepy,” I said to my husband, pointing to the facts of the case. There was no soil spillage. The area around the pots was completely clean. It was as if the trees were surgically removed, as if someone used a laser.
“It’s like a cattle mutilation,” I dared to whisper, a little bit in awe. Frankly, I can’t pull a tomato plant out of a four-inch pot without spraying dirt in a five-foot radius like a soil-filled jack-in-the-box, so I could only come to the conclusion that whoever helped themselves to my trees had some sort of extraordinary method of extraction.
“This was planned,” my husband said, who had a couple of Law & Order marathons under his belt, as well. “This wasn’t a random shrubbery theft. This was a deliberate hit.”
“You know, I’m inclined to think that,” I said,