Picture this…

Joe knocked on our door a couple month after the tornado. It was after dark, and nobody likes that. I looked through the peephole at a big guy. I suspected some bullshit was about to go down.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’m wondering if you need any help with your yard?”

I opened my mouth to tell him to fuck off, but I stopped. Nobody else was asking if they could help me. In the weeks after the tornado we got so much help. Friends were on the roof with me before the storm was even over. The homeboys and a rogue crew from Quincy cut the crown of a 100′ pine off the roof while the dark blue clouds were still so low you could spit in them. Utility trucks jockeyed with tree crews through the narrow paths between debris piles. Generators ran day and night. Help was everywhere.

Once the crisis was over though, it felt different. The daily skirmish with insurance adjusters, securing tarps, and scheduling contractors was depressing. The yard was a disaster, and although it bothered me, I had more urgent business.

Melissa and I disagreed on what makes a nice yard. Before the tornado I would call our property “Grey
Gardens Chic” or “Contemporary Adams Family.” My main concern was that nobody could see us from the street. Smilax vines crawled over and through unkempt and gangly azaleas. A thick carpet of invasive Coral Ardesia flourished in the shaded undergrowth. I dubbed the place Redberry Farm to tweak the fastidious neighbors who formed an Ardesia Slayers club. Not on my watch! My precious red berried babies would always have a sanctuary.

Melissa enjoys a sense of order and balance. She grinds her teeth pulling vines down from the trees with her brute strength until she has a migraine. It’s her happy place. She is the matron saint of Camellias, narrowing her eyes at me if I come near them with the clippers.

“I want everything around these cut back so they get enough sun” she says.

“They seem to be holding their own just fine” I say.

I had nature on my side for years. We did not have the budget, the knowledge, or the wherewithal to make a dent in Redberry Farm. The tornado swung nature into Melissa’s camp. Downed trees ripped away our privacy. The backyard was a damp mosquito farm, permanently wet all summer. After the tornado the sun blazed down drying it out. The fire pit was exposed to the road, ruining the illusion that we were in the woods. The ground was deeply rutted from massive tree trucks and cranes.

So I stepped through the door, pulling it behind me, tingling with the possibility that this visitor was up to no good. Through my distrust and irritation his words got through to me. He was offering to help, and we needed all we could get.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked, while sizing him up. I guessed him to be a bit older then me, late fifties or early sixties, and visibly strong with jacked shoulders and a barrel chest. He said he needed $60 for a motel room that night. Our culvert was still plugged with debris from the storm, and you could clearly see the wash where water sluiced across the yard when it overflowed.

“How about I clean that out”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Go for it.”

I brought him a pitchfork and shovel. He knocked it out easily and I paid him. Standing there at 9 O’clock at night he spun me a vision of what needed to be done, making a case for more work the next day. “Picture this” he said, and that became his signature phrase. And I could picture it, and for the first time I stopped mourning what we had and got curious about what could be.
Joe and his partner, Tiesha, became regulars at Redberry Farm, transforming our yard into something closer to Melissa’s vision, and i got on board. We got to know each other pretty well, becoming enmeshed in each other’s lives. They moved from the Motel 6 into an apartment nearby. Sometimes I would work with them, and we would finish up and have a beer on the deck just enjoying each other’s company. Joe was a raconteur, equal parts Haitian and Irish, and he claimed his heritage from both. He was from South Carolina, and spoke with a raspy southern drawl that was delightfully unfamiliar to me. He was also, by all accounts, a good looking man. The kind of man who got approached by ladies at Wal-Mart, who then met Tiesha’s wrath.

If circumstances were different, Joe and I would have easily become closer friends. We understood each other. He worked by the job, not by the hour, selling me on project after project. Some would say we paid him too much, but nobody else was offering to help. Besides, I wanted them to make it, and they worked their asses off through the summer heat and the cold winter. The yard is transformed. Wide pathways wind through pruned azaleas. The breeze blows through unimpeded by snarls of vines and Nandina.

It’s not quite done, and it can never really be done when the summer explodes in growth each year. We have a handle on it though, and Joe’s vision to follow.

They moved back to South Carolina. Joe said his mama was tired of his running around and wanted him closer. They had a place to live, and a job for Tiesha. Joe would continue to do his thing, hustling up work and telling people to “Picture this.” We hired them for a last hurrah- a 3 day push to get us squared away and give them enough money for a U-haul.

They’d been gone a couple months when I texted Joe last week. I asked him how it was going, and wished them well, but he didn’t answer. Joe changed phones frequently, always scrambling to maintain one so I shrugged his silence off. I figured I would hear form him eventually, or more likely, he would just show up at the house looking to borrow the ladder or talk me into the next project.

Instead, I got a text from his phone yesterday, but it wasn’t him. It was Tiesha. She told me Joe died March 6th. As hale and hearty as Joe appeared, he had a congenital heart condition, even being on the transplant list for a time. He responded well to medication, and rallied back strong as ever. He dreaded the thought of going through with a transplant, and to watch him work it was hard to believe anything was wrong with him.

With respect to their privacy, there is a lot I can’t tell you. We went through a hell of a lot more than yard work together. It’s hard to be friends when one of you lives in a house, and the other is struggling for a roof over their head. Joe and were not equally yoked, far from it, but we had our thing.

He taught me that sometimes you have to open the door.

Epilogue: What started as a blog to lie about cycling, is now closer to a collection of eulogies. There are worse fates for a blog. Its continued existence is a small miracle unto itself.

Thanks for reading,

Juancho