NEEDLING

Still wet outside. Rained all night and all of yesterday. No way to do any gardening. Another wet Sunday. Took Brutus on a long walk around the neighborhood. A few houses down from where I live, there’s a small bright yellow wooden house. It’s been on sale for more than one year. The people who bought it a couple years back, completely rebuilt it, painted it, and put up a little white picket fence around part of the front yard. This white picket fence had absolutely no utilitarian value. Three or so months ago, the house was finally sold to a young urbanite couple. They drive a small SUV. The new owners took the white picket fence down, and put up a little flower garden instead in the space between their front yard and the street. There is no sidewalk. Most places in Austin have no sidewalk. It’s fine when we’re in a little quiet neighborhood and walking on the street doesn’t put your life in danger, but when the back-alley dead-ends on 45th street for example, and I’m walking my dog, I have nowhere to go but to turn around, because 45th street is a main thoroughfare, and walking along that street without a sidewalk would be putting my life in grave danger. But I’m getting off the subject. Across from the little yellow house there is the railroad track going parallel with our common street. On this side of the railroad track, there is a ten foot wide lawn which goes along the track from 51st street to 46th street, unbroken, long green mostly unkempt lawn. It’s a great place to walk your dog. Everybody in the neighborhood does it. Dog doodoo all over the place, but somehow it doesn’t smell bad. When it’s wet, as it’s been for the last several weeks, the place is so full of grass, mud, debris, that it all turns itself around. When it’s hot and dry like it gets, it all dries so quick, you’d think all the neighborhood dogs were shitting bricks. This lawn is straight, large, and very easy for the railroad to take care of. All they have to do is pull an industrial lawnmower with a large tractor. Then another tractor comes in and makes big piles of leaves, grass, and whatever. Then a dump truck comes by, the tractor fills the dump truck, the dump truck and the tractor leave, and all is done in barely one day. The little yellow house stands approximately halfway between 51st street and 46th street, right at the mid-section of the lawn, about the point where the tractor usually piles the debris for the dump truck to pick up. Last weekend, when I was walking my dog, I saw the new owners taking care of their new flower bed. The man and the woman were having an animated discussion. I looked at them as I was walking Brutus, but didn’t try to listen in – I was too far anyway, and my hearing isn’t that good – but I observed them for the time it took for me to slowly walk along the tracks with Brutus. Finally, the woman got into her SUV and drove off. They didn’t put out angry vibes at all, but excited ones, the ones following the debating over something and then the excitement following directly the taking of a new decision, which they both apparently agreed on. I put it out of my mind and kept walking all the way to almost 51st street, at which point I usually take Red River and go for a walk in the neighborhood. By this time, Brutus, if he needs to, has all ready taken care of his poopoo needs, and I don’t have to worry about him using somebody’s clean lawn for his business, so I feel safe to go walking through the neighborhood. But as I turned around, I saw the man with a shovel under the drizzle digging a hole in the railroad track lawn! I stood there looking at him from afar, wondering what the hell he was doing. Instead of taking Red River, I decided to go back along the track. He was digging a large hole. It was wet last weekend, as it is this weekend, so the digging wasn’t too difficult. I though about it, and I thought about my backyard, how almost all the grass has been stomped and destroyed by the dogs, how it would be nice to have a lawn, and I figured he was taking tuffs of railroad track grass to plant in his backyard to get some good green going. The railroad track lawn being one of the few lawns with such thick grass, they must be using a good strain which grows well around here. What a great idea, I thought to myself. This guy’s not too stupid. I thought I had understood, and walked home asking myself whether it was legal or not to take – steal? – grass from the railroad company. If I decided to take on this grass replanting activity, should I do it in the dark around midnight so that nobody would see me? But if I did that, if a cop drove by, which they often do to avoid the Airport boulevard traffic, if they’re in hurry, would he stop and flash a big old flash light in my face, and pointing a gun at me thinking I was burying some sort of sinister evidence? These thoughts occupied me for the rest of the day, and I never came to a conclusion, thus I forgot about it until this morning when I was walking Brutus along the same path. In those holes, three of them all together, the new owners of the bright yellow house planted three trees, one in each hole. The trees are placed strategically in a triangle between the street and the railroad track. The triangle is so placed that it is impossible for even a small tractor to get around them. Now, this is a sort of conundrum. I like the trees, or at least the idea and spirit behind the planting of those trees, but I also like my long plush lawn taken care of at no cost to me by the railroad company. The planting of those trees is going to make their job very difficult. Will they simply run their tractors over the trees the next time they come? Will the railroad company sue the owners of the bright yellow house? Did the owners of the yellow house do this to spite the railroad company? Did they do it with the hope that the trees will grow and eventually hide the track and Airport boulevard – runs parallel to the tracks right on the other side – from their front room view? What were their reason? Selfish? Naive or misplaced environmentalist reasons? To spite the railroad company? Did they think this through?