She never liked her neighbour, with his flannel shirt tucked aggressively into his work trousers. Years of waving at him never managed to achieve even an unwilling nod, and the way he'd treated Janelle when she left was typical of the man, or at least what she'd assumed of him, given his ex-wife's way of shrinking in front of him when he came to collect the children. She knew that men like that did not take kindly to woman, to advice, or kindnesses. Years ago she had asked him to take down a floodlight that beamed into her lounge, and many years later, it was only the cider gum she'd planted that shielded her from that violent radiance. She'd have slungshot the bulb into shards of glass if she had any competence with projectiles, and knew undoubtedly he'd retaliate in kind.
She imagined him taking pleasure in killing. The day Janelle left he severed the standard roses on the front deck at their base, tossing them into the bonfire. She'd seen him out there with the chemical wand, slaughtering dandelions and beetles alike. There was a kind of arrogance in his stance as the creatures cowered from him. He whistled as he worked. Everything about him was blades and poison. He killed the softer elements of her attentive landscaping, replacing the serpentine edges with rigid and sharp steel ribbons, unwound from a roll she watched him wrangle with until the beds were very straight.
From her kitchen window she maintained a kind of vigilance over her neighbour. This kind of voyeurism was not good for her in the same way the news was not good for her, making her anxious and often angry. There was much wrong with the world, and she was powerless to fix it. Still, after coming in from the garden and making a cup of chai, she found peering through the kitchen window toward next door a form of entertainment. There were council letters to be written and the Environmental Protection Agency to call, and she had already dealt with the family burning tyres at the end of the court. She spent much time trying to identify what laws her own neighbour was breaking, but human laws did not always make sense. Regulations to protect the beauty and integrity of the wilderness did not extend to semi-suburban yards.
She watched him with a small chainsaw, trimming the understory of the gum trees so they stood to attention like soldiers, their errant branches sliced and diced and precisely stacked. These days it took her all day to move the wood delivery from the front yard to the porch, wheezing and puffing, her hip aching. It was hard on her own. Her husband had been dead ten years, but she still remembered collecting wood and the scent of formic acid as the ants scurried to save their white eggs, the huntsman spiders pressing themselves to the grain in an effort to hide, or dropping down to land on her scarf or hood. She loved these wild forays with him, watching his forearms tense to gather strength to push the whirring chain through wood that relented to the blade. She missed the way he would leave the living branches for birds, the best hollows left for nesting, cover up exposed starbursts of mycellium. 'We can take' he said 'but it's not just for us'.
Their garden was birdscaped with the same attentiveness. Tiny grevillea flowers and shrubs hid spotted pardelotes and silver eyes. Squawking wattle birds hung like bats from the red flowering gum. A harem of fairy wrens flitted from fence post to branch, curious, chattering. Occasionally, a pink breasted robin.
In contrast, the neighbour's neat hedge of leptospermum cowed under his hedgetrimmer: not a leaf out of line. The rabbits that dug under there scattered in fright from the noise. The warren was on her side and she refused to dig it in, delighting the way the dumb animals did not care for boundaries and would dig for onion weed under the moonlight on her front lawn just as the did on hers. He would walk about and press in the sods with his heel in the morning, grim faced.
Her plum tree was lopsided on the boundary line. Whilst she did not mind his pines overhanging the fence, providing shade to the starving soil underneath, he took to her trees with venomous loppers, and tossed falling fruit into her yard where the worms merried around their pips and the vinegary scent of rotting fruit ribboned cider-like in the warm breeze. She delighted in his angst as he beat and sliced his quarter acre kingdom into submission. Sometimes she fancied herself a witch, willing in the dandelion seeds and the nettle, the cleavers and the marigolds. Mischievously, she would shake their flower heads close to the boundary when the wind blew from the west, ecstatic when they took root in his gravelled entrance.
One day, she watched as a baby magpie misjudged it's flight and catapulted with a painful thud into his crystalline front windows that mirrored the forest from across the way, but did not ever let it in. She dropped her cup in the sink with a start, grabbed her boots and was ready to run to save the creature when his front door opened. She held her breath. If the ants and rabbits, worms and spiders had no hope against his will, what hope did this newly hatched, squawking fluffball?
But there he crouched, his hands tenderly cupping the fragile bird.
As the spring gave way to summer, the lawn, for the first time in years, remained unmowed, the weeds untended. Instead he sat on the porch with the bird, feeding it, stroking its black head, guffawing as it hung off his hands or played tug of war with an end of rope or pushed gumnuts one way or another up and down the deck. Although she knew he was not aware of her voyeuristic presence, she felt they shared a little camaraderie, watching the bird grow stronger and delighting in it's toddler antics.
Her plums dropped in his yard. He did not notice. She made jam and put a jar in his letterbox as an offering. In the hotter afternoons, when she watered, she let the hose spray his hedge, the water beading on the leaves and dripping down to the roots below. Her witch-gift seeds sprouted from his beds, softening the hard edges. Bright orange marigolds nodded in the light. A good year of rain caused two gums to take root in the front yard, which grew fast, and did not meet with his blades. The magpie liked to swing upside down from them before waddling back to his lap for a treat.
By the following Spring, it was as if the two properties had no boundary at all.
Yet it is the way of the world that all things come to an end, and birds must leave the nest. The magpie would visit from time to time, returning for offered treats, sitting on his saviours shoulder and plucking at an ear or increasingly untended beard. Both neighbours learnt to recognise his arrival by the particular warbling heh-call, heh-call. Her neighbour would open the door, and she would rush to the window, watching them both. How spellbound they both were by this passerine bird, how unaware of how their edges had softened.
By the next Spring, he failed to return, as is the way of wild things temporarily captive by humans. She expected the chainsaw to begin it's whirr, the lopping of branches, the projectile plums, the borders re-established. But the machine stayed silent, save to cut the winter's wood. Her letters were unwritten, the calls not made. There were other things to take joy in. The magpies would tug jute from her rugs to build nests, the bees built a dripping hive in the old redgum, and once in a while, her neighbour would nod across the increasingly unruly hedge that formed such a crude line between the two properties that were slowly becoming so much part of the adjoining forest that it was hard to tell where the boundary officially began.
And one day, coming home from the market, she found a neat row of logs stacked on her own deck, an unexpected kindness.
This was written in response to the Ink Well monthly challenge, where 'wild' was the prompt. You can find that here.
