I signed the papers two weeks later. I was fifty-eight then, which felt young to me at the time and feels younger every year. I had a pension, a part-time job at the county road garage, and a plan that involved a smoker, a lot of brisket, and that maple tree. For a while, that is exactly the life I had. I would come home, drag a chair into the shade, and let the day go quiet around me. My buddy Dave from across the street would wander over with two folding chairs and a thermos of coffee that was mostly an excuse to sit, and we would solve the problems of the county without ever standing up.
The couple who lived in the ranch house directly behind me were named the Hollisters. Retired, both of them, married about forty years by the look of it. Ed Hollister kept a vegetable garden that would have won ribbons if he had ever bothered to enter it, and his wife Carol used to hand tomatoes over the back fence in a plastic grocery bag because they always grew more than the two of them could eat. Good neighbors. The kind you do not appreciate until they are gone.
They were gone in the spring of 2023. Ed’s knees finally quit on him and they moved down to Florida to be near their daughter. I helped them load the last of the boxes and shook Ed’s hand at the truck, and he told me to keep an eye on the garden if the new folks let it die. I said I would. The garden died anyway, but that turned out to be the least of it.
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The new people behind me
The house sat empty a couple of months. Then one morning a black pickup pulled up out front of it, dragging a construction trailer, and I knew the quiet across that back fence was over.
The new owners were Travis and Lindsay Carter. Late thirties, both of them. I met Travis first, over the fence, the way you meet everybody out here. He had a handshake that lasted a half second too long and a way of talking where he was always already onto the next thing before you finished the last one. Salesman energy. He sold something, I never got straight what, but he sold it hard and he sold it constantly, and after ten minutes with him you felt like you had been pitched on something even if you could not have said what.
Lindsay I met less. She was polished in the way people are when they are always on their way somewhere. Nice enough. Distant. She would lift two fingers off the steering wheel when she drove past, which around here counts as a full conversation.
One afternoon I was up on the ladder trimming a low branch off the maple, and Travis leaned over the back fence with a can of something in his hand.
“Hey,” he called up. “Wanted to give you a heads up. We’re probably gonna tear this old place down.”
I climbed down a couple rungs so I did not have to shout. “You mean gut it? Renovate?”
He grinned like I had said something quaint. “Nah. Full teardown. We’re building our forever home.”