After looking at two dozen houses,
I was skeptical when the real estate agent said "I found it. You're
going to love this one. It's YOU. Move-in condition, no home improvement
loan necessary. And it has a gazebo."
The broker was almost right. I fell
in love with the house as soon as I walked through the door. There were
nooks and crannies that suited my temperament, a layout that had ample
room for children to run. One day the kitchen would need remodeling,
but it was livable. Then we went outside to the back yard.
"You call that a gazebo?"
I said.
"It only needs a little paint,"
she responded. "And you don't need a home improvement loan for
paint."
That which she called a gazebo was
a square box made of thick, non-filigreed slats of wood. Located at
the back of the yard, it was flush against a very tall fence that blocked
the view of a neighbor's property. A stringy vine with infrequent fern-like
sprouts wound tightly through the slats. The floor of the box was covered
with pieces of broken flagstone, some of which were buried under dirt.
Not your average gazebo, certainly not a marble one.
The gazebo sat on the side of an
untilled plot of land that was hidden behind a detached garage. I did
not love this so-called gazebo, but I envisioned a garden behind the
garage and the house itself was perfect. We bought the house and moved
in. I would do something about the gazebo.
After moving in, we discovered that
the untilled, empty plot behind the garage wasn't empty at all. The
previous owners had turned their four dogs loose here and the untilled
soil was covered with dog remains in assorted sizes and in various degrees
of dryness. Before we could think of beautifying the gazebo, we had
to turn dog remains into the soil. With the broker's statement that
we wouldn't need a home improvement loan ringing like a mantra, we made
our first trip to a garden shop to rent a rototiller.
When we began to turn the soil I
wondered if we had found a marble gazebo, for the dry, adobe soil was
harder than rock. But turn we did, and when we finished, we turned again.
We bought so many soil amendments that we wondered about that loan.
We planted tender young vegetable and flower plants. The gazebo would
border a beautiful garden.
Then we began to remove the weeds
that had so lovingly embraced the slats of the gazebo. They were loyal
those weeds, and didn't want to leave their beloved slats, and there
were thorns along their wiry tendrils. Bloody but unbowed, we yanked
at weeds, then dug into the hard, marble like soil to get at their roots,
so deep they reached to the other side of the world. We bought paint
and painted the squat square gazebo.
We replaced the thorny, stringy
vine with flowering vines which bloomed rampantly in the sunny climate
of Los Angeles, and soon the thick wooden slats of the gazebo were but
a glimmer of white under a verdant cover. We planted creeping thyme
between the broken flagstone on the ground. When we walked into the
gazebo, our steps released the aroma of thyme.
It took several years to get the
soil the way we wanted but we persevered and soon the soil, once as
hard as marble, turned as soft as cottage cheese. Now when we sat in
the gazebo, we were under a canopy of green and had the sight of asters,
zinnias, even stately delphiniums - hard to grow in Los Angeles.
It wasn't exactly a marble gazebo,
not even a lacy one, but one day we found the children having a tea
party in the gazebo. They had made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
but they had cut them like tea sandwiches. They were responding to beauty.
It was hardly a marble gazebo, but the broker was right - no home improvement
loan was needed.
Then I looked at the kitchen......
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