There is a humongous two-story flax plant in my front yard that threatens to envelop the neighborhood. It eclipses the Volvo. It sits like a giant pineapple next to the front porch, providing a misshapen privacy screen between our front window and the sidewalk. Its eight-foot leaves whack you on the head when you’re pulling the recycling can out, and the snail population that lives within its folds (an overachieving variety that seems to not understand the concept of a “snail’s pace” but rather hauls it en masse from one side of the sidewalk to the other while I’m grabbing a grocery bag out of the car) is healthy to say the least. The gardeners must whack it back weekly along the sides, so that it has a little upside down mullet: short spikey on the bottom and long and lovely on the top.
When we bought the house years ago, the flax plant was a three-foot, decorative feature among what I considered to be a fashionable assortment of grasses on a landscaped mound. I envisioned that the stark modernity of our slate grey stucco and blue-black door would eventually be softened as we added in structural, tropical greenery: reeds, elephant ear, papyrus. We would update the fencing around the house someday with the ultra-cool horizontal slats of eco-friendly Ipe that we used in the back. All of this would provide the perfect setting in which to screen black and white art films along the side of the house as we entertained and cocktailed hipster neighbors and recalled tales of backpacking through Indonesia. A Mazurka band would play ironically in the background as platters of amazing food were enjoyed. It would be the art that we feel in our hearts daily, manifested into a warm, vibrant and intelligently curated space.
In actuality, the yard was never updated with well-placed tropicals but rather with unwanted leftovers from a client’s landscape installation, and sparingly. We meant to have tall bouganvillea fluttering along the porch grate by now but somehow ended with three inch rockroses and a repotted houseplant that grew too outrageous for the kitchen. The mulch badly needs re-doing. That dark cool-kid black paint is peeling off the sidewalk and front door.
Life, just plain life, has been complicated these last few years. When we bought our house, our child then two years old, the gods seemed to smile down on us. Problems and solutions were syncopated. We felt things solidify and developed family goals (a fun and mysterious concept to two adults from dynamic single-parent households). Our careers stretched out and expanded and the sun just seemed to shine on everything we touched. I loved that time.
But, as the our child grew, the economy collapsed and our professional challenges mounted, we became stressed out about the things we were expecting to enjoy. I regularly returned home from work after the baby had been put to bed, having missed her entire day. I began to use my creative energy for work projects, rather than personal ones. The rented upright piano I had once relied so heavily on for late-night therapy did not fit into the 1940’s living room with the needs of the family, and off it went. We tried desperately to keep up with things: making time for each other, cramming in trips to the coast (during which I was eternally checking my blackberry and running off to make phone calls) and find the drive to stay interested in the world, but we ended up learning how to just buckle down and grind it out. It felt horrible to divest in my family, even though it was the right choice. We did not thrive, but we survived.
One morning several weeks ago, with the sun beginning to travel a stronger path across the backyard, I wandered outside, still my in pj’s and very much pre-coffee. I found myself suddenly, maniacally, pulling every houseplant I could find out on the back patio and pulling each out of its dry and cracked plastic liner, and too-tight pot. For several hours I filled new, bigger ones with sweet, healthful soil and a long drink of water, placing each shallow tangle of roots deep and tight. The sun grew stronger and I tossed my slippers into the bushes and rolled up the legs of my pants. The dogs wandered in and out of my workspace, hungry for breakfast but curious enough about my odd behavior to hold off on begging. I realized I hadn’t spent this much time outside by myself in, literally, years.
Since that afternoon, I have fantasized daily about taking a machete to the monster flax plant in the middle of the night. Some new neighborhood mandate about plant height will leave us with no choice but to dig all 300lbs of it from the earth and put it on craigslist. Or we may just get to the point where we just can’t stand it anymore and something has got to change, no matter how irrational it seems. And plant an olive tree where something overbearing and ill-fitting once stood.