The Constant Garden
I came upon the house in Smithfield by accident. The real estate broker hadn’t meant to show me the place; we were on the way to somewhere else traveling along a minor dirt road. I asked her to stop the car. I got out and stared.
The house was a small, clapboard-sided, Cape Cod clinging to a naked rise. The wedge-shaped, acre and a half parcel floated discretely, ship-like, between the road and the hilly sea of a neighbor’s open farmland. The parcel had been bulldozed, scraped down to the subsoil layer, but a dozen mature spruce trees had survived the saw and blade as had a handsome maple to the side of the house.
I didn’t go into the house. The tenant was the town historian, a mildly eccentric, seventy-something lady who had filled up her home with newspaper clippings, pinned the curtains together, and had not admitted visitors over her threshold in twenty years. That she hadn’t mown the lawn in all that time was what caused the owner to bring in the earth-moving equipment, figuring that the property would sell better if it could be seen.
"The real estate broker hadn’t meant to show me the place; we were on the way to somewhere else traveling along a minor dirt road. I asked her to stop the car. I got out and stared."
But, I didn’t mind not seeing the inside of the house. I was satisfied enough by its simple, classic shape, size and age to accept it and move on to the real point of my quest.
I had owned two previous houses – the first a rustic farmhouse in the shade of an apple orchard; the second, a house with a high stone foundation cut into the side of a north-facing cliff – and so my gardening attempts had been thwarted.
I was desperate now for a proper garden site. I looked up at the sky. The sun was bright, in full view, and I could see the arc it would describe; from the eastern top of the hill in the morning, around the whole long side of the parcel all day long, setting at the bottom, western tip of the property over where I imagined a pond would one day go. In other words, I had 100% southern exposure.
I could grow roses. I signed the binder that day. And so, the scene was set.
"I was desperate now for a proper garden site. I looked up at the sky. The sun was bright, in full view, and I could see the arc it would describe; from the eastern top of the hill in the morning, around the whole long side of the parcel all day long, setting at the bottom...