Duck Woods

I live with my father, Earl Attaway. He is eighty and I’m his oldest child. Some years ago, he lost his son, my younger brother, to the West Coast. That is how we say it, a typical locution of my family, meant to make light of the fact that my brother moved far away and never visits. Attaways excel at euphemism.

My father built our house on Todd Lane the year he turned forty, the year I was born, his only act of practical construction in an otherwise wholly intellectual life. While the house was under construction, my parents lived next door, in the small bungalow now owned by our neighbors, the Fords. I prefer that house, but my father built a two-story brick Colonial for himself and my mother because that was a design admired when they were newlyweds and he wanted to build one. An academic, he wanted to lay bricks. He wanted to work with his hands. It is still the largest house in a neighborhood just now beginning to gentrify. Houses that have survived years of benign neglect are being freshly painted in historically appropriate colors. Yards that have never known anything other than a push mower now have professional plantings and crushed gravel paths.

I’m a gardener, so theoretically it should make me happy to see all this interest people are taking in their yards. Except it doesn’t because they aren’t; hired landscapers do all the work. To have an interest in gardens without gardening is like having an interest in food without eating. Most of my neighbors just want their property to look nice, that’s all. They want perfect grass, and neat mulch skirts around their trees, and garden beds with color and texture but all of it easy to care for, which means the same four or five evergreen shrubs (genus Juniperus and Thuja, for the most part), mixed with a bit of azalea and hydrangea, maybe barberry and an ornamental grass, planted in repeat groupings. My boss, Blake O’Dell, calls it “LM,” for low maintenance. The other day I passed a house where an ambitious gardener had gone out on a limb and worked some deep red day lilies (Hemerocallis) into the design. It was a good idea, but my first thought was, Those will be gone as soon as the homeowners realize they should be deadheaded daily to maintain a tidy appearance.

Our neighborhood is called Duck Woods, though I have never seen a duck and there are no woods. It’s triangular in shape, bounded by a railroad on one side, a fast road—by which I mean the speed limit is thirty-five but everyone does fifty—on another, and a river on the third. My father says the area was originally Duck’s Woods, named for an old family in town, and that may be true. No one ever remembers where to put an apostrophe so the s was probably lost over time. The whole area is two miles from the university and just rural enough for chickens, but not rural enough for bonfires; urban enough for sidewalks, but not urban enough for apartment buildings or semidetached houses; suburban enough for everyone to need a car, but not suburban enough for a homeowners’ association to arise and impose maintenance standards.

My father knows everyone on Todd Lane. He often leaves flowers on doorsteps and treasures the thank-you notes he gets in return. He uses plastic milk jugs for vases, pulling them from the bins at the recycling center. There’s been a story in the paper about it. He cuts off the tops of the jugs, fills them with water and flowers from our weed-choked garden, and sets out, sloshing water everywhere, down his beige pants, onto his white tennis shoes. I asked him once why he couldn’t use jam jars or something smaller. His answer:

“If you had children, May, you’d know folks don’t want glass on the doorstep. A child could knock it over and get hurt.”

I know our street in a different way. I know that sometimes it takes the UPS truck half an hour just to go from one end of the street to the other because Todd Lane is full of people in what is called the “purchasing stage” of life: young couples with kids or kids on the way. The boxes range from Pottery Barn to Walmart, but inside the stuff is all the same.

Duck Woods is a perfect study in the intimacy of half-acre lots, and it isn’t all shared jokes and borrowed baking ingredients. There’s the house that overdecorates for Halloween and the house that overdecorates for Christmas. There’s the house that keeps chickens and the house that keeps a dog outside too much. Across the way and two houses toward the bridge, there’s a woman who has given a section of her yard to a refugee who grows his family’s vegetables there. Meanwhile, across the way and three houses down, there’s a woman who desires a garden worthy of the Anneville spring tour, and is thus waging a desperate effort to conceal the telephone pole in the middle of her backyard—placed there for a through road that was never built—behind a ring of Hicks yews (Taxus x media “Hicksii”), which will grow only to a height of about ten feet, and therefore hide the pole only for those with the vantage point of a hedgehog. Four doors down from her is a family slowly converting their entire yard into a paved play space for their children. Whether this is to save on landscaping costs or a hope that their son will someday play in the NBA, it’s hard to tell, but the sound of a basketball bouncing on an inexpertly laid court fills the neighborhood most evenings. The wife is skilled at container gardening and says she feels blessed not to have any trees in her yard. She serves as the head of a group that wants to cut down an old oak near a playground on campus. The oak is healthy, but the long perpendicular limbs extending over the play equipment worry her. Arborists have attested to the strength of the wood, other parents have signed a petition saying they enjoy the shade, but she believes it is better to be safe than sorry. The UPS truck stops at her house more than any other, by which I mean it’s a short step from ordering everything online to wanting to butcher an old tree for no good reason.

Three houses on our side toward the bridge is a woman who keeps five cats indoors and feeds the birds outdoors. I never walk by without seeing three or more of those cats staring morosely out the window, which does not make me sad because my heart is firmly on the side of the birds. I keep Hester inside, too. I do wonder what her house smells like, though. Two doors from us in the other direction is a young family with plastic play equipment always strewn about their lawn, never picked up, the pinks and purples now sun faded. At some point they spray-painted their camellia bushes silver; a project for the children or an attempt at gardening, I don’t know. The house on the corner has wind chimes that sound like dishes being washed, and the other corner house has a private yoga studio in the back that violates the zoning code for this neighborhood, but the only person who might care about that is the woman striving for the garden tour, and since the yoga instructor also has a beautiful bed of roses on her front lawn, she has never said a thing.

The variety of human creativity expressed in landscaping isn’t always a pleasure, but it is a wonder.

I try to be a good neighbor. I have never left a pumpkin out past Thanksgiving or Christmas lights up past the first of the year. The backyard is overgrown, true, but I keep the front under control. I rake the leaves and shovel the walk and throw down salt to melt the ice. I know my father tends to keep the neighbors talking for long periods of time and most of his conversations find their way back to World War II or growing tomatoes. He tires people with stories about who used to live in their houses forty, fifty years ago. Everyone seems interested at first, but how many times can you pretend to be impressed by the fact that Mrs. Profitt raised nine children in the two-bedroom bungalow you consider a starter home and plan to live in only until you have another child and move across town to the bigger houses and better schools?

I suppose people like my father out of some sense that it is right to honor the past. No one says “Negro” anymore, but no one tries to grow a ripe tomato from seed by the Fourth of July anymore either. His age earns him the right to startle people with his vocabulary and hobbies while their babies nap or idle in strollers or tear about the lawn. Like an old cat who drools, he is forgiven. He is ending his life on this street; they are starting theirs. If they notice this framing, they think it poignant. Not for one second do they think they might end their lives here, too, in such modest surroundings, on such a narrow road, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks from the university.

Fifteen years ago my father converted our basement into a walk-out apartment and gave the rest of the house to me. I suggested swapping. It was clear by then I was back to stay, but I wanted the basement, he could have the house. He refused. So I moved into the room that had been my brother’s. My old room was not an option.