PART 1 — THE SAME YARD
My name is Desmond Ackroyd and my brother-in-law lives directly behind me.
Our lots back onto each other on Corbett Row and there is one fence between them, cedar, about four foot ten, put in by the previous owners in about 2003.
Randall Culp is my wife’s younger brother. He is forty-one, he sells commercial flooring, and he has lived in that house since 2021, which was, at the time, a thing we were all very pleased about.
About four months ago I started finding piles along my side of that fence.
Grass clippings, mostly. Some hedge trimmings. Always on a Sunday, always after he had done his yard on the Saturday.
The first two times I honestly thought it was wind. I raked it up and said nothing.
The third time there was a full contractor bag’s worth of leaves tipped directly onto my tomato bed, which is a raised bed eleven feet long that sits about four feet off that fence, and which is not something wind does.
I brought it up at a family dinner. Lightly, in a joking way, because I am forty-six and I have learned that going in hard at a table full of in-laws never once in the history of the world has worked.
Randy laughed and said, “It’s basically the same yard, come on.”
It is not the same yard. It is my yard, and I garden in it, which he does not, which is the entire reason he has a surplus of grass and I have a surplus of nowhere to put it.
I asked him three more times over about six weeks. Directly, once in his own driveway.
Every single time he nodded and said “yeah, my bad,” in a completely genuine way, and every following Saturday there was another pile.
The last one was the second weekend in June.
I opened my back door at seven in the morning and there was a full wheelbarrow’s worth of clippings against the step. Not near the fence. Against my door. Three days old, already hot in the middle, and I could smell it in my kitchen through a window I had left open four inches.
I stood there holding my nose with my coffee in the other hand and I genuinely thought about it for about a minute — about what I was going to put through that fence at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning to make a point he would smell for a week.
I want that in the record. I thought about it and I enjoyed thinking about it.
I did not do it, and the only reason is that Trina came out behind me in her dressing gown and said, “Don’t. Please. Just don’t.”
So I got the wheelbarrow and I moved it myself, two loads, and I put it round the side.
Ten days later the leaves started curling.
The tomatoes first. The new growth at the top came in cupped and twisted, the leaflets curled downward like little fists, on a stem that was fattening in a way that was not right.
