My neighbor drags a plastic sheet across his backyard. Piled on the makeshift sled are the remnants of a season: tree limbs sheared by straight-line winds, leaves dead and damp from their layering, and bamboo that he’s just slashed out of the ground. He’s dumping it at the edge of the lake where he’ll set it afire later this evening.
On his head is the tan baseball cap he always wears when working back there. But he’s got on new gloves, necessary, I guess, after last weekend’s raking. I’ve never seen his hands but I imagine they were bruised, maybe blistered. He worked for hours.
Nobody would guess this from the looks of his yard. That’s how overgrown the yard has gotten. In my own yard, I work at taming, fighting the wildness that would come if I stopped. I refuse to allow even a single weed to raise its errant head in my territory. I watch, waiting for such wantonness.
Watching him raise his right hand and push that rake handle down into those leaves stroke by stroke makes me tired. He’s resting now, swiping the air across his face, maybe a fly or a bee or a mosquito. Before he moved in, the other owners never stepped foot in the backyard. To watch him labor so makes me wonder if the yard feels invaded after being forgotten for so long. He pushes and pushes, rakes and rakes.
Something about being touched again after neglect seems to require more effort than simple maintenance would have. Perhaps being left alone for a time creates a layer of adamantine cellulose that’s hard to penetrate. Something anti-cultivation takes root and then resists pruning. Still he keeps on, digging dull teeth into those leaves, slinging them onto that plastic sheet for another drag across the yard.
While he rests—rake on his shoulder, breath suggesting fatigue—the winds of March swoop in and tease the leaves. A few fly off back into the layer he’s trying to remove. But the respite must have worked, so he moves faster, raking against the wind, making the pile grow even bigger than before. After he empties this load, he picks up the machete and is back at the bamboo.
I suppose the bamboo is my fault. I started it from seedlings last spring because I wanted a screen to hide the ugliness: two years’ neglect is unsightly. Bamboo grows thick and fast; it doesn’t die easily. It also spreads.
The bamboo I brought home isn’t the kind that blooms often. I’m not sure what kind it is. Some bamboo blooms every 125 years. I only know my bamboo shoots up the height of the fence in a matter of days, new clumps forming before my eyes. Some call it a type of weed, something that can take over a yard before you realize what it’s doing. I’d set the tiny plants in the ground myself.
The fence didn’t stop them. They grew right over into the next yard. Apparently my new neighbor isn’t a bamboo fan. It’s a shame. I think this bamboo may flower if we leave it alone, let it go where it will.
He raises his machete as though the thin wooden stalks are enemies, a threat to what he’s working toward. Maybe that’s the way of some growing things. Now he’s pouring something on the bamboo, dousing it in circles and waves. He’s not going to wait for dark to set fire in his yard after all. He strikes a match and tosses it into the bamboo. I watch it blaze, the wind catching the flame and taking it up until it turns to smoke.