Beyond my Back Yard

This is a strange kind of grief. Although it’s been nine years, I didn’t know him all that well. He was the man on the other side of the Wrigley field style fence in my back yard. The fence is covered with the most hardy ivy. I’ve spent nine hot summers trying to kill it; it claws through my garden and sneaks into my lawn. But it will not yield. Even as I waged my death blows to the creeping foe, part of me always worried that he wanted it on his side of the fence; and now I’m kind of glad the ivy never died.

This week, though, my neighbor did. Seventy doesn’t seem that old to me anymore, and I’m not even sure what happened, but I heard through the grapevine this week that he had died.

It was a strange relationship we shared. The fence is high and sturdy and with the ivy practically impenetrable. I never did see him much. Unless I was in my kitchen window and he was headed, shirtless, to the hot tub on his patio. I will always remember his wrinkled, sagging skin and tousled hair. I never saw his legs.

There was the summer of the Frisbee. My daughter was four then, and took every delight in chucking the darn thing over the fence whenever I turned my back to pull a weed or start the mower. Then we’d find it, tossed gently back on our side, the next time we went outside.

We didn’t talk much either. One summer he saw me digging up the grass to create a garden, quite near his sunny corner of my yard. He must have heard me sweating and cursing so close to the fence. He offered me his rototiller to make the job easier. I’d say that’s the only conversation we ever had.

Oh, I heard him plenty. He and his wife used to fight up a storm. One or both of them was hard of hearing, because they’d come at each other at megaphone volume and their insults would fly over the fence like a Cubbies home run. Fast. And hard.

The pair loved to be outside, and apparently didn’t work. They’d bring their television out to the back yard and watch re-runs of Homicide at top volume in the afternoons. They’d sip their cocktails under the faded umbrella and Wheel of Fortune would spin them through the evenings.

This week the noise from the other side of the fence has been markedly different. Laughter. And more laughter. Stories about setting fires and walking dogs. Do you want beer or wine? the newcomers hear. I hear his widow’s voice, somehow less sharp these days. Reminiscing with her many children and the siblings of her husband. It has been a weeklong wake. I do think they’re Irish. And the drinks and the stories continue to flow tonight.

But the television’s off. The hot tub is silent. And I am left here on my side of the fence with my grief. I hate to think that I could have been more for him, that I could have had a more active role in his life. But I’ve always felt that good fences make good neighbors. And I didn’t want to get too involved.

Now I realize I’ll kind of miss him, that presence in my back yard just beyond the fence. And as of now, I think I will just let the ivy grow as it will this summer.