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Bricks, Brooks and Birdhouses

People in Crestline do great things with their yards. Just by going up and down your own street and doing a little trespassing you can get some great ideas for your own place. This is especially true in my neighborhood.

But before we start, about the trespassing. If you’re caught trespassing in Crestline and someone bursts out the door with a shotgun and yells, “Whatta you doin’ on my proppitty!?” just enthusiastically say something like, “Oh-h-h, I just lo-o-o-ve what you’ve done here with this trellis and the little hearts and the gnomes!” Melts them into a little puddle of warm Jell-O every time.

In Crestline, most people can’t have grass and sidewalks, and landscaping is a challenge. In my yard, for example, you can’t set anything down on the ground that is even close to round in shape, because it ends up where a bunch of other roundish junk has gone over the years—stuck up against the inside of the fence at the bottom of the yard. So any landscaping I do has to have something to do with steps.

A guy about four houses down from us had a great idea. He needed a way to access the top of his bank from one spot, and then he could walk across the entire top of it. He just shoveled out these three-foot by three-foot square dugouts that each had a floor, a back wall and two side walls. The back walls were only about two feet high.  He lined the floors and walls with old bricks without mortar, and with a day’s work, he had some great steps. Last week we drove by a house where a guy was giving away bricks, so we grabbed them up and now we’re going to make some steps of our own.

People in my neighborhood do grand things with their yards. A nearby neighbor of mine named Dave took a steep slope beside his house and made a beautiful rushing stream with rock banks and a great variety of perennials and native plants. It might explain why a bear that has been roaming our neighborhood for the past few months has been spotted in his driveway and in front of his house. The 30-foot stream has two branches, three waterfalls and three ponds, one with fish. Two variable-speed pumps that you can’t hear recirculate the 2,000 gallons of water at different intensities for various effects. 

Dave calls it a loving, but backbreaking project that has been in the works for three years and is not finished yet. It’s not only beautiful landscaping, it’s also very soothing and a great place to sit and take in nature. His next-door neighbors love having the very realistic and natural sounds of the stream next to them. One of our neighbors who walks by his house for exercise every day often stops to listen to it.  Dave extends an open invitation for his neighbors to come up to his house and just enjoy it. He says it’s flattering that people like it so much.

Not to be outdone, his neighbor Barry, who is directly across the street, is planning to build a G-scale model railroad that will run all over the place in his yard. He’ll start on that project after he finishes the inside part, which takes up a room of his house, and which will one day be joined with the outside track so the train will run both inside and outside. And we’re talking about a big train—some of the cars are over three feet long. On many weekend mornings you can find Barry hanging out at his favorite breakfast spot. You guessed it—The Loose Caboose.

We’re not as ambitious as these people. Austen, my 7-year-old, has spent nearly all of his weekly allowances on those gnomes that you see for sale at the Oak Trunk and Goodwin’s. He has a great assortment ranging from a tiny one that is wiping its brow, to a big one that is riding a huge snail and using the snail’s eye stalks for reins. He uses these gnomes, along with small wooden model houses and other props, to create little scenes around our yard that he calls, “gnome zones.” It’s cute, and I don’t have to do any work.

One woman that used to live here had probably 50 ornamental birdhouses around the front of her house, nailed to and hanging from big and small trees. Some of them must have been utilitarian as well, because her house had birds all over the place. She moved a year ago and took all of the birdhouses with her.  I imagine there was a big flock of birds following her moving van to wherever she went. That house has probably gained in value, but it has sure lost its charm.

There is a strange decorating phenomenon in a few places around our neighborhood, with one example of it just four houses up from me. In front of a house and beautifully painted with flying mallards, is a mailbox on a post, and right in the perfect position to accept mail from a mailman who is never going to come. I hope this guy isn’t relieved that he’s not getting all of that junk mail that he used to get down the hill and wondering why Ma doesn’t write anymore. I guess some people had such beautiful mailboxes when they lived wherever they lived before, that they just couldn’t bear the thought of sticking them in the basement.

You soon realize that it’s amazing what some people do with their yards when you take a closer look at Crestline.

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