Bougainvillea

Hello again! My first contribution to the reboot of Tasty Sauce is a rewrite of a piece of creative nonfiction from about twenty years ago...

                                                                  
                                          Bougainvillea
                                                     by
                                         Susan Cameron

Years ago, ten or fifteen, I brought home lots of little plants from the nursery. One was a white bougainvillea, notoriously fragile and difficult to grow. I carefully planted the little guy and hoped for the best.

All those years gone by and the other little plants are lost to memory, but the white bougainvillea kicked ass. It waited a year, deciding whether or not it wanted to live, made up its mind, and took over the fenceline between Abbey's house and mine.

"Can I drag some of it over here?" she asked. "I like it too." Of course! There was plenty! So she did. The original grapestake fence was lost under a twenty-foot-long, twelve-foot-high white explosion. It flung out new branches that arched like fireworks through the blue sky. It smothered the fence, it climbed the junipers, it headed for the front yard -- go, baby, go! I couldn't see Abbey's yard and she couldn't see mine, which meant we could both stumble out to our respective picnic tables first thing in the morning, bleary-eyed, bathrobed and coffee in hand, and not have to think about how we'd look to the neighbors. (I have cape honeysuckle on the other two sides of my back yard, also about twelve feet tall; her perimeter was totally covered, too.) Then Abbey sold her house.

Vietnamese hate bougainvillea. People who come from countries where there's a lot of jungle tend to hate things that look like they're going to cover the house and devour it. Abbey said her parents (they're Filipino) are the same way. In the Philippines, if you can afford to cut down all the jungle around your house, pour concrete around it, then paint it green, you are truly styling.

I heard the chain saw as I was working in my house. I knew they'd cut down all the bougainvillea on their property; that's their right. I even saw the guy hacking away at it when I left the house. It wasn't until I got back home that I got a good look at the carnage.

They'd chopped my bougainvillea down to a trunk and stubs.

They'd cut almost three feet over on my side of the property line.

I stood by my bougainvillea, looking at it with the same horror I would if a friend had been in a terrible accident and lost both arms below the elbows, and legs below the knees. And I got a really good look at the ancient fence, too -- the four-by-fours rotting away, the bug-eaten slabs of grapestakes toppling over, some on my side, some on theirs. Even before they slaughtered my plant, I could see the fence was falling down, but I didn't have to see enough of it to care.

The next morning I saw the old man, the oldest of my tribe of new neighbors, with the chain-saw-massacre perpetrator they'd hired. I screamed and yelled at the two blank faces until I got disgusted and refueled with more coffee. English-speaking Tiffany came out in her back yard and I called her over. "But we have the right to cut back to the property line, Susan."

"You didn't have the right to do this, Tiffany." She leaned over the rickety fence I'd propped up to see what I was pointing at. "This is my property, not yours, and whether you like my plants or not, you have no right to cut things down on my property."

"I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! What can we do to make it right?"

"Not a damn thing! What can you do to fix this? It'll take years to come back." I walked away, too choked up to talk.

I've been thinking about it for a week now, and I've decided my new neighbors can pay for a block wall between our homes. They can pool their half-dozen incomes together and handle it. If not, I will find out if I can charge them with criminal trespass. I will take them to small claims court and sue them for destroying my property. I will call Fountain Valley code enforcement and turn in their cousins on the next block for illegally adding onto their home.

I've said for years it's important to pick your fights carefully because there just isn't enough energy to fight them all. I do believe I'm up for this one. I've let a lot of things slide in my life for the following reasons, or excuses: a) I'm not perfect myself and we all make mistakes; b) There are things that just can't be fixed, so I've got to let them go; c) There's no point in getting into a fight if there's nothing to win; and d) Never get suckered into being an unwitting, unwilling actor in somebody else's soap opera.

I don't think any of these four things apply in this situation.

I may not be perfect, but I don't destroy other people's property. They can't fix my plant, but they can fix the fence. There is something to win, or at least something that will partially replace what was taken from me. And I don't smell a whiff of soap opera here, no daytime drama -- just stupidity.

I really like my house. It's a cheerful, inviting place. It's only half a mile away from my business; no commute to speak of, no mad rush to get to work in the morning. Even though Jim and I broke up here, most of my memories are good ones. I've got other nice neighbors, and we look out for each other. I've been here twenty-one years, and I'd like to live here into the indefinite future. I just hope this isn't a nudge from the universe, telling me it's time to think about leaving. My industry is certainly in the doldrums, and my business has been flat for about four years. There's enough to pay the bills, but it's certainly not the glory days of the eighties.

I don't know. I just don't know. This isn't a complaint. I'm just thinking. I've got loads of equity in the house, but I'd have to leave Orange County to use it well. What's the sense of selling one overpriced house if you're just going to buy another overpriced house, with no Prop 13 tax break, and probably new Mello-Roos taxes to boot? I'd have to bail.

The trouble is, I've been here so long I've grown roots as deep as my bougainvillea's. I know the pricey-and-good restaurants, the cheap-and-good restaurants, the restaurants with nice patios and tables where you can write. I know some of the hidden staircases down the cliffs of Laguna and Corona del Mar, the most likely places to find a parking spot at the beaches, even on Balboa Island in summer. I know good thrift stores and bookstores and coffeehouses, and I've walked around marinas and beaches from San Clemente and Dana Point to Seal Beach and over the border into Los Alamitos Bay and Naples Island and Belmont Shores, and I still don't know everything about this place. I'm still not tired of it.

And here's the other thing: I went to five elementary schools by the fifth grade. I got my own place when I was seventeen and moved eleven times in five years before Jim and I moved here from Detroit. Amazing, eleven moves in five years, always looking for nicer places with cheaper rents and better roommates. (It's not quite as tough as it sounds; most of the time, what I owned fit in my car. The first time I had to rent a little U-Haul trailer, I was sort of pleased. I'd finally acquired a piece or two of furniture and was a solid citizen.) On my final visit back to Detroit, so many years ago, I made a pilgrimage to all the places I'd lived. I drove around Coplin, Lakepointe, Evanston, Hampshire, Hazelridge -- a crazy white girl risking her present just to look at her past.

The house in which I spent years nine through seventeen had been painted charcoal gray and looked as grim on the outside as it had been on the inside. Most of the places I'd rented were battered and forlorn, and one of my favorites (the one with beveled glass windows and mahogany woodwork and ivy growing over the kitchen window) had vanished entirely. It seems the City of Detroit had decided it was better to raze the abandoned houses that were being used as crack dens, fill the basements with dirt, and plant grass. Less chance of liability for the city; less crime for the few remaining neighbors to deal with. An untended grassy meadow was growing on the empty lot where that once-beautiful old house had been, and there were three or four more vacant lots just like it scattered down the street between dilapidated ruins that had been somebody's pride and joy, somebody's homes. The block had turned into the architectural equivalent of a meth-head's mouth.

I remember the relief I felt at flying back to Orange County. I love to travel, but I also love coming home. I love to drive up and see my house, my flowers, my trees. I turn the key in the lock and there are my comfortable chairs, and my pretty paintings, and green plants and candles, and I'm home.

Could I make another home someplace else? Of course. Could I be happy living someplace else? I don't doubt it. And perhaps some day I will move, whether obnoxious neighbors prompt it, or economics, or a new love with ideas of his own, or just the wheel of change slowly turning and taking me with it, the way it did twenty-one years ago. But for now, I'm rooted, and this is where I grow.

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Postscript, an additional twenty-one years later: Lots of life changes, but -- still here, still growing. :)