It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [52]
“Well, I do think you’re right, but I’m going to leave them empty,” I tried to explain. “I’m making a statement to whoever stole them.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Sue said, nodding. “Gloria mentioned that you couldn’t afford to replace them.”
“That’s not exactly what I said,” I started, but Sue had already begun to walk away.
“Petunias can be nice,” she said over her shoulder. “They’re not expensive, but they are awfully common.…”
Still, I stuck to my guns and steadfastly refused to replant anything. The pots stayed empty for a long, long, long time. I definitely wanted the goblin who thought they could help themselves to my foliage to know that the stock had been depleted and their crime spree was over, at least in my yard.
Then, one day in almost fall, I went outside to pick up the paper and, lo and behold, there were two bushes freshly planted, one in each pot. And there was not a drop of soil on the ground. Again, in the dead of night, someone had snuck up to my porch this time delicately placing two deep-green shrubs with brilliant red berries on either side of my door.
It was now the third weird thing that had happened in my yard.
I pressed each of the neighbors, particularly Sue and Gloria, and all of them denied it, although by the looks on their faces, the relief had been as long coming as if the empty pots were equivalent to not only a People’s Couch in my front yard but a People’s TV, which is also down the street.
The good deed went unclaimed. I questioned friends, Dave the mailman, Eva my UPS lady, and still no one would fess up.
Until one day my husband and I decided to wander downtown and go to a food fair, and we weren’t there five minutes before we ran into Roy.
“Hey, how are you two?” Roy greeted us jovially, and then pointed at me. “What’s all over you? Was there an ash cloud that just swept through here?”
“Oh,” my husband laughed, swatting at my hair. “I think it’s powdered sugar.”
“Every time I bite the funnel cake, it touches my head,” I said, trying to explain and pretending to be horrified at the size of my fair food snack.
“I heard about the shrub shanghai,” Roy said sympathetically to my husband. “That was unbelievable.”
“What’s even weirder is that a couple of weeks ago, in the dead of night, a little plant fairy brought us some bushes back,” I added. “We just woke up one morning and there they were! Personally, I think it was one of our neighbors who was distressed over the disgrace of the empty pots and was afraid the zoning police were going to switch us to the zip code of the neighborhood that doesn’t bring their trash bins back in.”
Roy smiled. “Well, there might be a plant fairy that lives up the hill somewhere and always has a spade in her back pocket, ready to do good deeds. But I’m not saying if I know for sure or not.”
“Has anybody who lives at your house been to Home Depot lately?” I asked Roy, trying to see him around my funnel cake.
He just grinned.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he said cryptically, but I knew in that smile that somewhere up the hill, in the form of a spade and a tarp, the good had outdone the bad.
You Give Me Jellyfish Fever
“Nicholas, run! Run!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, trying to shout over the deafening crash of the surf hitting the beach as I watched him about to get swallowed by a huge wave.
As evidenced by my screaming on the beach like a demon, our vacation with my nephew had not turned out quite as planned. My husband and I were terrible, terrible substitute parents. When I originally had the idea of bringing Nick up to visit us for a couple of days before my sister and the rest of her family flew up, I had nothing but charming and delightful reveries in my head, and now it was looking like the reality couldn’t be laughably further from those trite little dreams.
It’s true: Many years ago I assessed the impact of propagating my family’s genome even further and quickly withdrew my nomination for motherhood in the general best interest of the world,