Ha! You nature bloggers with your enviably scenic backyards chock full of wild flowers and exotic birds (any bird is exotic if not a pigeon) and the occasional wandering deer don’t have anything over us urban apartment dwellers any longer. Kind of. Well, ok, you do, but you go with what you’ve got. And what we, for some unknown reason, have in our back alley right now are chickens. Yes, skyscrapers tower over us from the corners. We can see home 20 minutes away. “Look there’s the skyscraper we live under, sweetie, we’re almost home.” And I’ve no clue what they’re doing behind our apartment building, but there are chickens where usually are pigeons.
Our building is a circa 1910-1920 4 and 3 story walk-up. It’s old enough that when it was first built there was once a carriage house behind, where is now a 7 story apartment building and a large garage underneath to the left. Inbetween is a fence with a slight bit of green area between. Step out our back door and one is under a fire escape and in several feet of what wants to be a fenced of New Orleans alley between us and that narrow green space. The concrete is ancient and looks like it was bombed out. There are a few small concrete block wanna be garden boxes that are set against the fence which I tried to make into gardens when we moved in but didn’t work out, too much shade and the landlord uses the area for storage and the stinky filled trash bins go back there now as some homeless had started dumping all the trash out on the sidewalk.
And now there are chickens. Walk out back and there are three chickens today. The pictures attest to their presence. What in the hell they’re doing there, I don’t know. They weren’t there yesterday.
The concrete Buddha is ours. We carry it with us everywhere and have it stationed so when we look out the kitchen window, there it is, when unobstructed by garbage bins. The small plants you see are remnants of the garden I tried to put in last year.
Reminds me of last year when a tree showed up back there.
Doesn’t take much to disorient me, it seems.
It was Spring and nature had been doing the job of watering the perhaps potential garden for a couple of days. The day after the rains I stepped out back to water the seeds planted in a couple of the concrete-block lined beds and the basil and tomato seeds in pots. I’d noticed through the kitchen window that the small holly tree planted by the woman who formerly lived in this apartment had been sheered again by something. A limb the size of a tree had already diminished it by half during the one day of snow that winter but had fortunately missed the Buddha serenely resting to its left. It’s a casting that we got about 8 years ago as a gift from a guy for whom husband had recorded a “Will you marry me, sweet valentine” song which the love-struck one had written and planned to give to his beloved on Valentines (married now with two children). Anyway, the holly tree, which was already oddly unpleasing in shape, which had been cut in half by the tree limb, was indeed even less a holly tree. Three not too large, dead, broken branches beneath it (not holly, not large or weighty enough to be the offender) and the newly sheered away part of the holly tree was nowhere in sight. It was only three feet tall now and just a few battered looking limbs aimlessly probing the air. I started picking up small broken branches. Always more small broken branches about.
Except for Homeless Bill who stored his stuff in 5 trash receptacles in one corner, and the landlord who piled up old screens and air conditioners against this and that wall, I was the only one who ventured into the back area and at the time felt rather protective of it as I was struggling with installing the admittedly pitiful potential gardens. I had this notion of helping the back lot become the New Orleans style sanctuary it had the potential for being. There is this wood louvered, green door set into a yellow wall out there that makes me think of New Orleans. The summer we moved in I would go out and sweep, weathering the mosquitoes, pick out of the “rock garden” the cigarette butts the upstairs folk and Homeless Bill tossed there. Would clean up the pigeon feathers and odd bits of trash that end up back there.
I went over to water the garden seeds in the L-shaped ragtag, concrete block, and log lined bed against the east fence looking over the entrance to the parking garage. Looked to the right. I had earlier in the week week left there for a day, in that spot, the carcass of a rubber plant before shaking the earth off its roots and throwing it out. I forget for a moment I’d thrown it out as I saw all these exposed roots sitting there. I realized the exposed roots were attached to a trunk. I realized the trunk was attached to a real live full-sized tree that had for the moment blended with an old tree overhanging that part of the bed.
What? What was tree doing there? About eight feet tall, full-bodied. Obviously happy somewhere else until recently because it had a few sprays of springtime blooms but had been homeless long enough that the leaves were shriveled and starting to dry. What in the hell was a tree doing sitting there in a bed only about a foot and a half deep. What was a full-grown tree doing sitting there, all its roots exposed for the world to see? I went to the door and called for Marty. He came and looked. “What’s that doing there?” I asked. He didn’t know. I knew he wouldn’t know but I had to ask. Despite the fact he didn’t know, I kept asking him. “Why do you keep asking me?” he asked. Because there was no one else around to ask. In the next apartment building, on the second floor, a balcony door was open above us and I could hear people enjoying a small gathering. I looked up to see them inside seated around a table. Had they been on the balcony, I would have called to them, “Did you lose something?”
Confounded, I wondered if the tree’s roots had been exposed long enough that it was already dead. Should I make an effort to try to plant this big thing, I wondered, knowing it was impossible. Did the tree think this was its new home or was this some pit stop for the tree and whatever dropped it off was going to show up in the middle of the night and carry it on to its intended home? If I impossibly tried to plant it then the giant prehistoric bird that I pictured having dropped it there would be angry with me, but really, it shouldn’t have left the tree sitting roots exposed and all.
Or the tree was some kind of thank you from the Great Garden Elf, who saw me trying once again to plant seeds, tilling the earth with fork, and in thanks it looked around, saw all the other trees were taken, and chunked this one down.
Impossible. I couldn’t plant it. That thing was big. Eight feet may not sound big but this was a big tree. “Should I water it?” I asked Marty. “Looks like it’s already almost dead to me,” he said
Still discombobulated by the tree, I backed into the kitchen and fell backward over a chair H.o.p. had put there climbing up to pluck something off a shelf.
The mystery of the how and why of the tree was never solved, which had even been tied to the fence so that it stood upright. The landlord asked me if I had for some reason brought it in. I said I had planned to ask him that. We stood and stared a long time at the tree.
I was never quite convinced that the landlord hadn’t put it there as a joke. Except that he seemed a bit put out a couple of weeks later when sawing off the many branches, whittling it down to garbage pick-up size.
At least the chickens didn’t cause me to fall over.
Chickens. There isn’t any feed sprinkled about where we can see it. Maybe there’s feed and water tucked under one of the other fire escapes, but the area is full of tiger mosquitos and we are still itching from the couple of shots we quickly took.
Dark enough back there behind the building that I had to brighten these shots considerably so you could see the chickens.
I tell myself that certainly our landlord will know about this. He’ll know the how and why of the chickens.
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