Next to the carob was a front-yard hedge—again, big on flowering, covered with bees, and tending to get out of hand. It ran from the back edge of our property out to the street and separated us from our neighbor, the Widow Conoyer. When its huge shoots leaned over and started consuming the dear old lady’s driveway, my dad would give it a “crew cut” and we’d have a dismal cluster of five-foot-high bare sticks for the next several months. But hauling the many truckloads of trimmings up to the dump was some consolation since we usually came back with cool stuff like a working Victorola, boxes of magazines from the ’50s, an iron bedstead, or a dog. That hedge took a lot of abuse but it just kept coming back. You could see it bud up on its way toward making new leaves, just days after the mutilation.
The real joy of our yard was the ivy hedge out back (that is, once you navigated past the piles of surplus construction materials, long-parked cars and campers, the defunct metallic-orange fiberglass dune buggy, the hodge-podge horse stable, and the fire pit). The hedge separated our property from some mysteriously silent older neighbors. I always envied them because they still had original orange trees and never even tried to make their old farm house look suburban. I worried that they let the fruit just rot on the ground and I guessed our house had been built on land they had once owned and still wanted.
The ivy out back had gone all to wood. There were gnarled twists of tree-like vine supporting it. Whatever fence had once been there for support had been absorbed and turned to dust long ago. A few rotted fence posts and some wire were the only traces of it remaining, and they were now suspended at odd angles in an ivy stranglehold, sometimes not even touching the ground or each other.
No matter how dry the California summer became, and no matter how much we neglected to water it, that hedge was always cool, green, and thriving. My mom said it had roots that went all the way under our house and I imagined it someday consuming my little bedroom like a fairytale castle.
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