Under The Garden

The broken saucer lies in the sun. She dug it up from the backyard whole, but it slipped from her fingers just as she unearthed it. After all those years buried under rock, it cracked when it hit a little stone.

They had tried to buy the house that was once her grandmother’s, but got the address wrong (her mother’s faulty notes) and bought the Witch’s house instead. Not that it really matters anyway—all the houses on the street are pretty much the same with their clapboard fronts and little square porches with cement block steps. It’s the house across the street—243, not 248. The front window would look directly into the living room of the old family home if there weren’t so many trees in the way.

There’s not much from the diary she recognizes. The bridge to the south was mentioned once, and of course the pump house and the waterworks are major landmarks. But pretty light on scenery all and all: most of the early stuff is about boys.

The place, of course, has to be repainted. The roof needs to be fixed, and the driveway has to be put right. She digs a garden, goes to lay some patio stones, and finds furniture and old rusted-out appliances buried deep. It makes no sense: a wringer washer choked with rust and dirt, the rotted wood cabinet of a sewing machine, a metal lawn chair, and an oak table top so decayed its planks are softened into strings and crumbling pulp. Nothing can be saved, but all of it is in the way. Beneath the dandelions and creeping Charlie, the backyard is a junk pile, a deep well of garbage and stone.

Most pieces are dug up and hauled to the curb. They try not to put out too much any one collection day, and after a few weeks the worst is cleared out. Everything but the washing machine. It’s the heaviest piece, but weight isn’t the problem. It just goes down too deep and seems to be stuck on something underground. It’s near the back fence so it might be under the cement foundation of a post. Either that or it rusted into a sprawling root from the big elm. In any case they can’t get it out. Her husband pries it with a shovel and the shovel snaps. The fence wiggles and heaves, but the washer is lodged firm.

They give up, excavate the dirt inside and fill it with dark soil from the gardening store. It’s large enough for the root system of a rose. Rusted through enough at the bottom, they hope, to allow a little drainage. It must be because the rose lives. They tell their friends about it. It’s something to mention when they’re out on the patio or walking along the paved way in the garden, pointing to this bush or that. In time it’s forgotten.