What We Owe To Those Who Came Before

For David.

In 2021, as we all were, I was terrified and everything was changing.

At the height of the Covid housing price boom, my parents decided to sell the house they, and at the time, I, were living in. While I was figuring out what to do, a family member of a friend was selling an old rowhome in an industrial area that needed a ton of updates and renovations to sell, but they didn’t feel like doing them. The owner was going to stay with family as she was now 81 and needed additional help around the house, and with so many stairs, this house wouldn’t do.

With my family just upgrading to a larger residence in the community where they already had a modest modular home, they had enough left over to snag this place at way under market value, and suddenly I was responsible for a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 3 floor, 100+ year old rowhome surrounded by refineries. I was thrilled.

It did need a lot of work, but I felt a responsibility to those who came before me to leave certain things the same. Any stickers or things stuck inside of cabinets stayed. The person who showed us the house at first was one of the previous owner’s sons, who had grown up in the home, and I wanted to honor the people who came before me. I was given something I neither worked for nor felt I deserved. I regarded every area with a deep reverence for the people who’d lived their entire youth and adulthood in this home. I came so excited to garden and honor the home by keeping it beautiful.

One former resident, however, has been particularly helpful; David.

I don’t know much about David. I didn’t know his full name until yesterday. I simply knew that every time I saw something peeking out of a corner in the basement or the storage shed that looked like gardening equipment, it usually was. The house, the yard, all of it (which included a potting shed when I moved in that we’ve since removed), was just endlessly finding gardening things everywhere that were useful for the first year or so that I lived here.

The other day, we were cleaning out the storage shed, and I noticed several big tomato cages in the back that i’d never seen before. I breathed a heavy sigh; ours are plastic and not very sturdy, and the tomatoes suffered last year as a result.

I remember shutting the door and feeling like a friend had left me those tomato cages. I was overwhelmed by how much I wanted to know about the person who had left them there.

Unfortunately, I can’t speak to David or ask him any of the many, many questions I want to ask him. He took his life in 2008.

What little I do know about David is as follows. He was born in 1971. His obituary tells me he worked as a veterinarian’s assistant. Through my family, early on, I found out that he used gardening as a way to help manage his addictions; I believe it was drugs, but it could have been anything. I know from some strange online message boards that he went to a “treatment” facility funded by a very wealthy, kooky religion I can’t mention for fear of disappearing.

Everything else I know, I know from the backyard.

I know he wasn’t terribly organized. I know he knew what he was doing and really had gotten into gardening. I know that either he or his mother loved lawn ornaments, as we have a vast collection sitting under one of the backyard shrubs.

As a veterinary assistant, he must have loved, and felt the same pain for, the 10-20 stray cats that roam in and out of the yard. I like to imagine we feel the same kind of delight when seeing a new cat stroll up the walk, or a cool bird, or a particularly fat squirrel.

There are so many reasons why I garden, but now, David is one of them. I don’t know who planted anything in this yard. It could have been his mother or him or someone else entirely. But to honor them, I won’t tear out the sea of peonies that are unevenly planted. I won’t rip out the daylilies, so big and yellow and bright in the summertime. I will add on, and hopefully someone else who loves gardening will live here after me and they’ll add on to what I’ve done.

A girl can dream, I guess. But this isn’t about me. This is about David.

We’ll never talk. I’ve never seen his face. I may never see it, period. But when I’m in that yard, I can feel the peace he must have felt on the wind while i’m weeding or watering or whatever task I’m up to. I will never know him, but I feel that I do know him, and I hope the upkeep of the existing plants that I do honors him and his memory.

Thanks, David. For everything.