My Neighbor Tried to Stop Me From Parking on a Public Street, but Her Plan Backfired the Moment She Booted My Car

I have lived on Chestnut Street for thirty-one years, which means I have watched the street change around me in the way that streets change over decades, the families that arrive and the families that move on, the houses that get renovated and the ones that slowly soften into their foundations, the trees that were planted as saplings and are now old enough to have serious opinions about the sidewalk.

I have been a neighbor, in the genuine sense, through all of it.

My name is Margaret. I am sixty-three years old, and I have been a widow for seven years, and the house on Chestnut Street is the house where I raised my daughter Carrie and where I have had Christmas dinners and birthday parties and one very memorable Fourth of July that ended with a minor incident involving fireworks that I have agreed never to put in writing.

The house is mine in the way that a house becomes yours when you have lived in it long enough, when your memories are in the walls and the garden knows your hands, when you can navigate every room in the dark without touching anything.

The driveway is small.

This is not an apology, simply a fact. The house was built in 1952 and the driveway was designed for the cars of 1952, which were a different shape and a different relationship to domestic architecture than the cars of today. The driveway fits two cars if they are parked with precision and the drivers are people who have practiced, and it fits one car comfortably, which is what it usually held for the seven years after Paul died when it was just me.

I drive a 2004 Honda Civic.

It is gold, or was gold, in the specific faded way of cars that have been gold and have spent twenty years in the sun becoming a color that exists between gold and what gold wishes it had never been. It has 187,000 miles on it. It has a small dent in the rear passenger panel from an incident in 2019 that I prefer not to discuss. It has a crack in the windshield that I have been meaning to repair since 2021 and have not repaired because the crack is in a position that does not technically impair my vision and because repair costs money that I have been directing toward other things.

It has some rust around the wheel wells.

This is the car I drove to work for twelve years after Paul died, to the accounting firm where I am a senior bookkeeper and where I have been reliable for twenty-four years in the way that people who need to be reliable are reliable, quietly and without announcement. This is the car I used to take Carrie to the airport when she moved to Seattle and to pick her up again every Christmas. This is the car that has been in my driveway and on the streets of this neighborhood without incident for eleven years.

It is not beautiful.

It is mine.

Carrie and her husband David came to stay in February.

Their house, which is on the other side of the city, was undergoing a significant renovation that had expanded from its original scope, as renovations do, and the timeline had extended in the way that timelines extend when you are dealing with contractors and weather and the particular creative chaos of a project that keeps revealing new things as the layers are removed. The original estimate had been six weeks. By the time they arrived at my door with two suitcases and Carrie’s extraordinary ability to make herself at home in any space, the estimate was three months.

I gave them the driveway.

I gave them the driveway because they were working, both of them, and because leaving at different times for different destinations required the flexibility of a car you could get in and out without rearranging a puzzle, and because I am their mother and the driveway is there and parking on the street is not a hardship.

I began parking the Honda on Chestnut Street.

This is not unusual.

Chestnut Street is a residential street with parking on both sides and no restrictions beyond the standard no-parking-within-fifteen-feet-of-a-driveway rule, which I have never violated because I have been driving long enough to know these rules and to follow them out of both respect for the rule and practical self-interest. There are many cars parked on Chestnut Street at any given time. On a weekend evening the street can be dense with cars belonging to people attending various gatherings at various houses, and nobody has ever found this remarkable because it is a public street and parking on public streets is what public streets are for.

I parked in front of Linda’s house.

Not because I chose Linda’s house specifically, but because it was the nearest available spot to my house, and when you are returning from work at six in the evening in February, the nearest available spot is the spot you take.

Linda came to my door the following morning.

She was carrying a coffee cup, which I mention because the coffee cup was the specific detail that made the whole thing feel, in the first moment, like it might be a friendly conversation, like maybe she had come to say hello and the coffee was evidence of a neighborly intention.

She said, if I parked my car in front of her house again, I would regret it.

I looked at the coffee cup.

I said I was sorry and explained about Carrie and David and the driveway situation, and I also said, gently, that I was not breaking any rules.

Linda raised her eyebrows.

She said my car was in her line of sight every time she looked out her window.

She said it was a rust bucket.

She said it ruined her view.

I want to describe Linda accurately because accuracy is important here and because the easy version of this story makes her a cartoon, a simply unreasonable person who exists to be corrected, and while she is unreasonable she is also a human being with an interior life that I do not have full access to and that might, if I did have access to it, explain something about why she is the way she is.

What I know is this. Linda has been on Chestnut Street for nine years, which is less than a third of my tenure. She moved into the large house on the corner, which she owns, and from the beginning her relationship to the neighborhood has been the relationship of someone who believes that aesthetic standards are something she has the authority to enforce regardless of what the relevant laws or social norms might say about that authority.

The flowerpots.

Three years ago, the Petersons at number seventeen had put out a collection of ceramic pots on their front walk, the kind of casual front-garden display that adds warmth to a street without being excessive, and Linda had removed them because she found them cluttered. She had actually picked them up and put them on the Petersons’ back patio without asking, leaving a note that said the front walk was not the appropriate place for personal items.

The bicycle.

My granddaughter Sophie, who is nine and who was visiting for a weekend last summer, had left her bicycle on the edge of my lawn, the edge that borders the sidewalk, and I had come out to find the bicycle in the recycling bin at the curb with a note from Linda that said bicycles should be stored appropriately and not left in a way that created visual clutter.

Sophie had cried.

I had retrieved the bicycle and said nothing to Linda because I had been raised in a tradition that believed in keeping the peace and because I was aware that Linda, whatever her faults, was a person I would be living beside for the foreseeable future and that relationships with neighbors were worth preserving.

But I had noted the bicycle.

And I had noted the flowerpots.

And I had noted the various other incidents over nine years, the notes left on people’s doors about their lawn maintenance, the aggressive horn-honking at anyone who pulled briefly into her sightline to turn around, the complaints to the homeowners’ association about everything from the color of a garage door to the height of someone’s holiday lights.

Linda is a person who has appointed herself to a role that nobody gave her.

She is the neighborhood’s quality control.

The evening after she came to my door, I parked on the street again, in front of her house again, because it was again the nearest available spot, and because I was not going to begin organizing my parking around Linda’s preferences when my parking was legal and her preferences had no authority over it.

The next morning I came outside to go to work and the boot was on my car.

A wheel clamp, the bright yellow kind that parking enforcement agencies use to immobilize vehicles with unpaid fines, clamped to my front driver’s side wheel.

I stood on the sidewalk and I looked at it.

My first response was a kind of white, empty surprise, the specific blankness of encountering something that does not fit your available categories, because the boot is a thing that happens in certain contexts, to certain cars, in certain situations, and I did not fit any of those contexts, situations, or categories.

Then Linda appeared.

She came across the street in her robe, which was a thick cream-colored robe of the kind that suggests a person who spends considerable money on home comforts, and she was laughing.

She was actually laughing.

Not the private satisfaction laugh of someone who has gotten away with something, but the full open laugh of someone who is enjoying a performance and wants me to know it.

She told me she had warned me.

She told me I would regret it.

She stood on the sidewalk in her robe and laughed in my face.

I stood there for a moment, holding my car keys.

I want to tell you what I felt in that moment, because the feeling is important.

I felt anger, first, the specific clean anger of someone who has been genuinely wronged and knows it. Then I felt something underneath the anger, which was a kind of tiredness, the tiredness of someone who has been keeping the peace for nine years with a neighbor who has been weaponizing that peace, who has understood that my commitment to being a good neighbor has functioned as permission for her to continue escalating.

And then, underneath the tiredness, something else.

Something that was not quite amusement but was in that territory.

An idea.

The idea arrived not as a plan exactly but as a sudden clarity about the situation, about what it was and what it wasn’t and what the appropriate response actually was. The appropriate response was not calling the police immediately, which is what I had been about to do, because calling the police would produce a predictable sequence, the police would come, the boot would be identified as illegally placed by a private citizen, Linda would face some consequence, and Linda would then simmer in resentment and find new ways to express it.

The appropriate response was something that addressed the actual problem.

The actual problem was not the boot.

The boot was a symptom.

The actual problem was that Linda had decided, over nine years, that the neighborhood was hers to manage, and that nobody had ever made her genuinely understand that it wasn’t.

I said good morning to Linda.

I said it with the specific pleasantness of someone who is not currently expressing what they are currently feeling.

She looked slightly surprised.

I took out my phone and photographed the boot from several angles, the boot itself, the relationship of the boot to my car, the relationship of my car to the street and the curb and the clear absence of any no-parking signs. I photographed Linda standing nearby, still in her robe, which was not strictly necessary but felt like information worth having.

Then I went back inside, told Carrie I needed to borrow her car, explained briefly that Linda had done something inadvisable to mine, and drove to work.

I thought, on the drive to work, about what I was going to do.

I thought about it through the morning, between the accounts I was working on, in the specific corner of my mind that runs quietly on problems that have been set aside for later. I thought about the boot and about Linda and about nine years of flowerpots and bicycles and notes about lawn maintenance.

I thought about what Linda had done, technically, legally.

A private citizen placing a wheel boot on a legally parked vehicle on a public street is not within any authority that a private citizen has. It is, in various jurisdictions, a criminal offense, ranging from vandalism to interference with a vehicle to unlawful restraint of property. I knew this not because I am a lawyer but because I am a bookkeeper who is methodical about information, and in the quiet hour of my lunch break I looked it up and confirmed that what I already suspected was accurate.

Linda had committed a crime.

She had committed it in front of witnesses, since Carrie was home and had seen the boot from the window before I came outside, and she had essentially confessed to it by coming to laugh in my face.

But knowing this was available to me as an option was not the same as deciding that option was the right one.

The right response, I had decided by mid-afternoon, was not criminal charges.

Criminal charges were available and proportionate but they would produce a result that was, ultimately, about punishment, and what I wanted was not punishment. What I wanted was understanding. What I wanted was for Linda to grasp, in a way that was vivid and direct and impossible to dismiss, that her relationship to the neighborhood was not what she believed it to be.

The idea, which had been forming since the morning, completed itself at around two in the afternoon while I was reconciling a quarterly report.

A delivery.

A special gift.

I want to tell you what I ordered and why I ordered it, because both are important.

I ordered a large decorative garden planter, the kind that is approximately three feet tall and three feet in diameter, made of fiberglass in a faux-terracotta finish. I ordered it from a garden supply company that had same-day delivery available in my area.

I ordered two of them.

But the planters were not the gift. They were the container for the gift.

The gift was the contents.

I spent twenty minutes on my lunch break ordering the contents, which were an assortment of trailing and climbing plants, specifically chosen for their vigor and their visual presence, the kind of plants that, given appropriate containers and placement, would be very visible.

Very visible from inside a house.

From a window.

I included a card with the delivery.

The card said: For Linda, with my warmest regards. I wanted to contribute something beautiful to your view. Your neighbor, Margaret.

I sent both planters and the plants to Linda’s address.

I arranged for the delivery to happen that afternoon while I was at work.

The delivery confirmation arrived at three-forty-seven. Delivered and signed for.

I drove home at five-thirty.

As I turned onto Chestnut Street I could see the planters from a block away. They were large and they were placed on the sidewalk in front of Linda’s house, which is where the delivery driver had left them, which was the correct place to leave a delivery for a house that had no covered porch.

They were very visible.

I had my window down and I could hear Linda before I could see her clearly, the specific register of a voice that is communicating outrage to an empty street because the object of the outrage has not yet arrived.

She saw me.

She ran toward my borrowed car.

She was wearing what appeared to be the same robe or a very similar robe, which told me something about her afternoon.

She said: did you do this?

She said: how dare you?

I parked the car.

I got out.

I said: good evening, Linda.

She gestured at the planters.

She said: what is this? What are these doing in front of my house?

I said: those are garden planters. I sent them to you as a gift.

She said: I don’t want them.

I said: I thought you might enjoy them. They’ll look very nice from your window.

She stared at me.

The specific look of a person who has received a response they did not anticipate.

I said: I’ve been thinking about your concerns. You said my car was in your line of sight and that it ruined your view. I wanted to do something about that.

She said: by putting these monstrosities in front of my house?

I said: they’re actually quite lovely planters. I’ve included a variety of trailing plants that should fill them out nicely by spring.

She said: I’m going to call the city and have them removed.

I said: that’s certainly an option. You might want to check the local ordinances first, though. Planters placed on the public sidewalk without blocking pedestrian access are generally permitted, in the same way that a legally parked car on a public street is generally permitted.

She looked at me.

I said: also, while you’re looking at the ordinances, you might want to look at the section about wheel boots on privately owned vehicles. It’s interesting reading.

Her expression changed.

Not dramatically. A slight shift, the specific shift of someone who has just understood that the situation is not entirely what they thought it was.

I said: my car is in the same position it was this morning. The boot was removed. I’m guessing by you, since you put it on, but I don’t want to assume.

She said: it’s gone.

I said: good. Because I have photographs of it, and of you, from this morning, which I shared with my lawyer.

This was a slight exaggeration, in that I had not yet contacted a lawyer, but it was not a fabrication, in that I had the photographs and I did intend to consult someone about my options, so the sentence was directionally accurate if not chronologically precise.

Linda said: you called a lawyer over a parking dispute?

I said: I called a lawyer over someone illegally booting my legally parked vehicle.

She said: your car is an eyesore.

I said: that’s a matter of opinion.

She said: it’s a fact. It’s old and it’s rusty and it brings down the whole street.

I said: Linda.

She waited.

I said: I’ve lived on this street for thirty-one years. You’ve lived on it for nine. In those nine years, you removed the Petersons’ flowerpots. You threw my granddaughter’s bicycle in the trash. You have complained, by my count, about the appearance of at least six different properties on this street, including mine. You have sent notes about lawn height and holiday lights and the color of the Hendersons’ garage door.

I said: and now you’ve put an illegal boot on my legally parked car because you don’t like looking at it.

She said: I was just trying to maintain some standards.

I said: they’re not your standards to maintain.

She said: somebody has to.

I said: no. Nobody has to. People maintain their own properties according to their own preferences within the limits of the law. That’s how it works. The neighborhood doesn’t belong to you. The street in front of your house doesn’t belong to you. The view from your window doesn’t entitle you to control what legally exists on a public street.

She was quiet.

Not the quiet of someone who is absorbing something, not yet. The quiet of someone who is looking for the counterargument.

She said: that car is ugly.

I said: yes. It’s old and it has some rust and I’ve been meaning to get the windshield fixed. It’s also mine, and it runs, and I’ve driven it to work every day for eleven years, and I parked it in a legal space.

I said: I’m not asking you to love the way it looks. I’m asking you to understand that your aesthetic preferences don’t constitute authority over where I park my car.

She said: the planters are on my sidewalk.

I said: they are. I wanted to give you something to look at. Something green.

She said: I’m going to have them moved.

I said: that’s your right. They’re yours. I sent them as a gift.

She looked at the planters.

They were, genuinely, quite nice planters. The size of them was dramatic in the way that large garden features are dramatic, and the faux-terracotta finish was convincing enough to look substantial rather than cheap, and the plants, which were starting to show some of their trailing habit even after only an afternoon, suggested what they would become in a month.

She said: why would you send me a gift after what I did this morning?

I said: because I’m your neighbor.

She looked at me.

I said: I have been your neighbor for nine years. In those nine years, I have not once complained about you to the homeowners’ association, even when you threw my granddaughter’s bicycle in the trash. I have not left notes on your door. I have not contacted the city about your property. I have waved at you from my driveway and I have shoveled the sidewalk in front of both our houses when it snowed because the sidewalk connects and it’s easier to do both.

I said: I’m not your enemy. I’m your neighbor. And I’m asking you, as your neighbor, to stop treating this street like something you own.

She was very quiet.

I said: my daughter and her husband will be gone in a few months. When they leave, my car goes back in the driveway and this all becomes moot. In the meantime, I’m going to park on the street when I need to, because it’s a legal thing to do, and I’m going to expect that my car will be where I left it when I go outside in the morning.

She said, after a moment: I shouldn’t have put the boot on.

The sentence arrived very quietly.

I said: no. You shouldn’t have.

She said: I just get so. I have opinions about things.

I said: I know.

She said: people find that difficult.

I said: they do.

She said: I think my standards are reasonable.

I said: I know you think that.

She said: they’re not?

I said: some of them probably are. But the thing about standards is that you get to hold them for yourself. When you try to hold them for everyone else, they become something different.

She was quiet for a moment.

She looked at the planters again.

She said: trailing plants?

I said: yes. Nasturtiums and sweet potato vine. Maybe some petunias in spring.

She said: nasturtiums are edible.

I said: they are.

She said: I knew that.

I said: they’re also quite cheerful looking.

She said nothing for a moment.

Then she said: I’ll put them on the porch. They’ll get better light there.

I said: that sounds right.

She looked at me.

She said: you’re not going to report me. For the boot.

I said: I haven’t decided.

She said: you haven’t decided.

I said: I have documentation. I have photographs. My lawyer knows. If this happens again, I’ll use them.

She said: it won’t happen again.

I said: I’m glad to hear it.

We stood on the sidewalk in the February evening, which was cold in the specific way of February evenings when the day has given up on the sun early, the particular blue-gray cold of five o’clock in winter.

She said: your car really is quite rusty.

I said: I know.

She said: it needs work.

I said: it does.

She said: there’s a mechanic on Folsom Street who does good work on older cars. My brother uses him. He’s reasonable.

I said: thank you for the recommendation.

She looked at the planters again.

She said: I’ll put them on the right side of the porch. They’ll get the morning light.

She turned and went back toward her house.

At the foot of her front steps she stopped.

She didn’t turn around.

She said: I’ll need to know what the nasturtiums prefer for water.

I said: not too much. They actually prefer slightly dry soil. Too much water and they stop flowering.

She said: I would have watered them to death.

I said: most people do.

She went inside.

I stood on the sidewalk for a moment and looked at the street, Chestnut Street, my street, the street I have lived on for thirty-one years and where my memories are in the houses and the gardens and the trees that have had enough time to have opinions about the sidewalk.

I went inside.

Carrie was in the kitchen, having been at the window for the last portion of the conversation, which I had expected because Carrie has always had her father’s way of gravitating toward the location of interesting events.

She said: nasturtiums?

I said: she needed something to garden. Garden people are less trouble than people with nothing to tend.

Carrie said: you gave your nemesis a garden.

I said: she’s not my nemesis. She’s my neighbor.

Carrie said: Mom. She put a boot on your car.

I said: yes. And she said she wouldn’t do it again.

Carrie said: and you believe her?

I said: I believe she meant it when she said it. Whether she’ll still mean it in three months, I don’t know. But I didn’t want to start a war. Wars on Chestnut Street tend to last a long time.

Carrie said: she threw Sophie’s bike in the trash.

I said: I know.

Carrie said: Sophie cried.

I said: I know that too.

I said: what do you want me to do? Have her arrested?

Carrie said: kind of?

I said: that doesn’t get Sophie’s afternoon back.

Carrie said: it’s the principle.

I said: the principle is that she crossed a line and I made it clear to her that the line is there. Whether I make it clear through a criminal complaint or through a conversation and a planter of nasturtiums, the message is the same. The difference is whether we’re neighbors afterward.

Carrie said: you actually want to be her neighbor.

I said: I already am her neighbor. I’m going to continue to be her neighbor for as long as I live in this house. The question is what kind of neighbor.

She sat down at the kitchen table.

She said: you’re a better person than I am.

I said: I’ve had more practice.

She said: that’s what’s happening? Practice?

I said: that’s part of it.

I put the kettle on.

I thought about what I had said to Linda, about standards and who gets to hold them for whom. I thought about the specific quality of Linda’s face when I had asked her if her standards applied to herself, the slight reorientation of someone encountering a question they had not asked themselves.

The truth is more complicated than the story I have told Carrie, which is the simplified version, the one where I am the patient neighbor and Linda is the difficult one and the planters are a clever resolution.

The truth includes the fact that I have my own standards.

I have my own opinions about how things should be done and how people should behave and what constitutes appropriate conduct. The difference between me and Linda, or one of the differences, is that I was raised to understand that having opinions about how things should be is not the same as having authority over how they are, and that other people’s choices, when they are legal and not harming anyone, are not mine to correct.

This understanding was not always comfortable.

I had opinions about the way the Hendersons maintained their front hedge, which I found somewhat chaotic. I had opinions about the Petersons’ ceramic pots, which were more cluttered than my preference. I had opinions about the young man two houses down who played his music too loud on summer evenings, and about the family on the corner whose Christmas lights stayed up until March, and about any number of other small things on Chestnut Street that were not the way I would do them.

I had never acted on any of those opinions.

Because they were my opinions and the things were not mine.

That is the whole of it.

That is the thing I had tried to say to Linda on the sidewalk in the February evening, and whether she had heard it or whether she had heard something adjacent to it while thinking about nasturtiums, I did not know.

The car situation resolved itself gradually in the weeks that followed.

The boot did not reappear.

Linda did not come to my door.

She did, one morning, wave to me from her driveway when I was going to my car. A small wave, the conservative wave of someone not entirely comfortable with what they are doing. I waved back.

The planters appeared on the right side of her porch the day after our conversation.

I could see them from my driveway.

She had planted the trailing plants correctly, with the right spacing for how they would grow, which told me she had either done research or she knew more about gardening than her threat to water the nasturtiums to death had suggested.

By March, they were beginning to fill out.

Carrie and David left in April, when their renovation was complete, and the Honda went back in the driveway, and the parking situation on Chestnut Street returned to its ordinary state.

The day after they moved back into their own house, I noticed a bag of bulbs on my front step.

A paper bag, the kind from a garden center, with a folded note tucked into the handle.

The note said: I thought you might like tulips. They do well in well-drained soil. They will come up every spring without much help.

It was signed with an initial only. L.

I planted the tulips that weekend.

They came up the following spring, which is now, which is where this story finds me, in late April, looking at the tulips in my front garden, red and yellow, the cheerful uncomplicated color of flowers that come back every year whether you deserve them or not.

Linda has not removed anyone’s flowerpots since February.

She has not thrown anyone’s bicycle in the trash.

She sent a letter to the homeowners’ association about the Henderson hedge, but it was phrased as a question rather than a complaint, and the Hendersons trimmed the hedge in the approximate region she had described and everyone moved on.

She still has opinions.

She probably always will.

But she has not put a boot on my car.

And she gave me tulips.

I think about this sometimes, the specific quality of what happened and what it means. I think about what it says that a wheel boot on a legally parked car on a public street can be answered with a pair of planters and a conversation on a cold February evening, and that the answer, imperfect and incomplete, is nonetheless more durable than the alternatives.

I am not claiming that what I did was the right response in any universal sense.

There are situations where the right response is a police report and a lawyer and the full weight of appropriate consequences. There are people whose behavior cannot be redirected by nasturtiums and a direct conversation. There are neighbors whose difficulty is rooted in something that no exchange of pleasantries will address.

Linda is not those people.

Linda is a person who had been allowed, for nine years, to believe that her standards were the neighborhood’s standards, and who had never been told clearly and directly that they were not.

Once she was told, she adjusted.

Not perfectly. Not completely. Not without the residual habits of nine years.

But she adjusted.

I think about what it cost me to do what I did.

The boot was frightening in the morning, the specific fear of something wrong happening to your property without your consent, the vulnerability of realizing someone thought your things were available to be acted on. I was angry. I was late to work. I had to borrow my daughter’s car.

And I had to be more patient than I felt.

I had to be more patient than felt reasonable, more generous than felt warranted, more willing to imagine a future in which Linda and I were functional neighbors than the morning of the boot suggested was possible.

I had to choose the tulips over the police report.

I want to be honest about something.

The planters were a clever response.

I knew they were clever when I ordered them. I knew they would land with impact, that they would make a point, that they would communicate to Linda that I was not simply going to absorb what she had done and move on without response.

There was, in the idea of the planters, a satisfaction that was not entirely generous.

I would not be honest if I pretended it was pure goodwill from beginning to end.

But here is the thing about clever responses.

A clever response that ends with tulips on your doorstep in the spring is not the worst outcome.

A clever response that leads to a neighbor who waves from her driveway and plants her nasturtiums with appropriate spacing is not a victory in the way that victories are usually understood, the zero-sum kind, the kind where someone wins and someone loses.

It is something else.

It is two people who live beside each other, who will continue to live beside each other, who have arrived at a version of that life that is slightly more honest than the one they had before.

Linda knows, now, that I have limits.

She knows that those limits are real and that I am willing to name them.

She knows that the street is not hers.

And I know, now, that she is capable of more than the entitlement she performs.

She researched how to plant nasturtiums.

She bought tulip bulbs.

She left them on my step without a word, just an initial, because full acknowledgment of what had happened was perhaps still too large, but the gesture was not nothing.

The gesture was something.

The tulips are red and yellow.

They are in the front garden, in the spot beside the driveway, where they catch the morning light.

They will come up again next year.

Every spring, without much help.

That is what she said.

They will come up every spring without much help.

I think she was talking about more than the tulips.

I think she was saying, in the language available to her at that moment, which was the language of a gardener who had learned to water nasturtiums correctly and who had left a bag of bulbs on a neighbor’s doorstep without signing her full name: I will try.

Every spring.

Without much help.

The Honda is still in the driveway.

It is still old and still rusty around the wheel wells and still has the crack in the windshield that I keep meaning to repair.

I made an appointment with the mechanic on Folsom Street.

Her brother’s recommendation.

He is, in fact, reasonable.