About A Little Thing You Did That No One Said Thank You For

And on the magnitude of a plank.

My Dear Friend,

My family lives on a corner. We thought this was exciting, because it meant that there was apparently more land — all those side yards we were responsible for! But in reality, it’s a nightmare. In the winter, you must shovel nine times as much sidewalk as everyone else. In the summer, you must mow nine times as much lawn. And no, the number nine is not literally involved, but it does feel about correct. You have no legal ownership over the sidewalk or the green space adjacent to it, but you are legally responsible for keeping it nice. And if you fail to keep it nice, as stipulated by a mean man with a yellow clipboard, you get a ticket.

The person from whom we bought our house tried to get rid of as much lawn as he could, and good for him. I hate a lawn, and so does, it turns out, my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. She doesn’t like grass on her feet, and I’m with her. Grass: who needs it. Our house’s previous owner dealt with the grass by planting a bunch of African violets, which are invasive and difficult to abide. We have added a dogwood tree and a raised bed. You are supposed to ask the city if it is ok to do things like this, but the city will look the other way as long as the thing you do is pretty.

Last fall, I wanted to add a corner flower bed. The corner was grass and weeds, plain and simple. The weeds were dandelions, which I’d like to add, are my favorite of the weeds, because they are yellow and delicious. I thought about hiring someone to really rip up the grass and get the dandelion roots out, but Luke thought he could do it himself. I thought this was foolish, but I let Luke do foolish things around our house all the time. It’s free.

I had grand ambitions, and things started off strong, with hyacinths, alliums, that kind of thing. I planted bulbs. Bulbs are generous: you put them in in fall, and they seem to spend the winter contemplating how they aren’t going to let you down when spring rolls around, and then they don’t. I find summer flowers tricker. Right now, the corner garden could use some love, and I don’t have time to love it. I planted wildflowers and things, but they haven’t come up because it hasn’t rained and I haven’t put a sprinkler out. (To be fair, I don’t have a sprinkler.)

As we sashay into July, the corner garden has seen better days. Gardening blogs are torn about what to do about tulips after they’ve tulipped, so ours are ungracefully decaying, beneath leaves and whirligigs. The alliums go to seed in a way that’s kind of beautiful — so long as you have other, newer flowers to complement them. Our corner garden does not have these. 

What the corner garden does have is a white haired guy who pulls weeds from it most days of the week.

He asked Luke if this would be okay in May, when a dandelion started making its way through the dirt. It would be the first of many — since Luke did a perfectly non-professional-landscaper human job of ripping up the lawn last fall. Luke learned the guy’s name that day but he forgot it immediately. One day we saw him doing it from the window in our upstairs front room. “Oh, there’s that guy who pulls the weeds,” Luke said. “He asked me if it was OK.” I felt very moved.

I’ve seen him about 100 times since then, but never in person, only from windows, or from down the street, so I’ve never been able to say thank you. Now that the corner garden looks dingy and gross, people have started throwing Cheetos bags in it, etcetera. The man retrieves these things. The people who started the garden (me) do not deserve this kindness; but the garden itself does, and the man stops and does it every day. It takes him five minutes. And then he moves along.

This is a small thing. It’s a gesture.

The garden is unkempt because it is so far down the impossibly long list because I have been GOING THROUGH IT. I feel that I am drowning. My girlfriend Kat texted me that she wished she could do more for me. She said she  wished she could be a boat I could climb into instead of, as she texted, “I don’t know… a plank?” I have been thinking about this. 

When you are drowning, the difference between a plank and not a plank is enormous. It is infinitely bigger than the difference between a plank and a boat. When you give a plank, you are saying, “Hey! It really matters to me that you stay alive.” And that is a big deal.

It’s hard, too, when you’re holding on to a plank, to sufficiently thank the person extending it. If you are a plank-holder: thank you. If you are pulling a weed a day out of someone else’s yard and they haven’t run down the stairs even one time to tell you that they notice and it makes a difference to them: I am telling you right now that it is a big deal. This is the kind of thing that keeps us moving through the water. This is the kind of thing that keeps us going. It doesn’t have to be more than this. 

Love,

Sophie