It Looked Different on the Model by Laurie Notaro

Author:Laurie Notaro
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345526311
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-26T10:00:00+00:00

Chill Out, Grass Lady

To tell the truth, I had walked up into the house through the front door and had gone back to the car three times in the course of the day before I noticed something was wrong. When it finally hit me that things were not as they should be in front of my house, I stopped dead in my tracks and gasped dramatically, “You have GOT to be shitting me!”

Frankly, I don’t know what other reaction you could possibly have once you realize two trees have been stolen from your yard.

The two trees, on either side of my porch in enormous pots, were gone. Simply gone. As in not there. The enormous pots were still there, but the trees themselves—two beautiful azaleas with fuchsia-colored flowers that had just exploded into bloom—were no longer planted in them.

I stood there and stared at the porch, speechless, looking for the trees. Because as anyone who’s had anything stolen from them will tell you, the first reaction you will have when you discover your thing is gone is that you will look for it. As in, “Certainly my eyes deceive me. Humanity cannot be so depraved that someone would thieve up to my front porch in the dead of night and steal two trees from my yard. I have overlooked them taking a break from being potted trees and they are in lawn chairs sunning themselves on the north side of the yard, because I’m sure it’s frustrating to be a tree and never be able to go anywhere, suffering from Restless Trunk Syndrome.”

And no matter how many times you’ve been stolen from, the reaction is always the same: disbelief. Complete and overwhelming shock to the point that if you go out to the street and your car has been stolen, if there is a fire hydrant within the general vicinity, you will look behind it. Because you cannot believe it. Getting robbed, it seems, never gets old.

As it turns out, this isn’t the first time that I’ve had live goods plucked from within inches of my front door. I’m actually a veteran of plant crime. On Mother’s Day a few years ago, some asshole waddled up to his mother’s house with a ceramic pot full of pincushion flowers and Miracle-Gro potting soil that I had purchased from Home Depot merely eighteen hours before. It hadn’t even cleared my bank account yet when D. B. Cooper jumped off my front steps holding my planter, scurried to his getaway car—which, remarkably, wasn’t registered to me—and showed the jackal who bore him that although he couldn’t be bothered to stop in at Walgreens to get a friggin’ card and a stuffed animal, a son’s love is always worth making a rap sheet a couple of lines longer.

That morning, I even looked behind the folding chair I also had on the porch for the twenty-pound pot of flowers, just in case I had misplaced it.

But you know what? There’s no misplacing trees. I mean,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.