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Having more or less recovered from the shock of finding a goateed stranger camping in our
house, we took stock of our little slice of paradise.
We couldn't help admitting that the house looked superb. In fact, after puttering around
for a couple of days, touching up barely-discernible wall scratches, straightening pictures
that were no more than a quarter-inch off plumb and rearranging the sixty or so books in our
bookcase, we ran out of things to do inside.
So we turned our attention to the garden.
By rights this was Michael's domain. Early in our relationship he had demonstrated a
green-ish thumb by rescuing a couple of all-but-dead plants from my balcony and lovingly
nursing them back to health.
The following spring he bought a spindly-looking palm tree and fertilized, trimmed and
cajoled it into a state of spectacular vibrancy by summer's end. One August afternoon I actu-
ally saw a tourist turn his camera away from the stunning Gothic cathedral across the street
from our apartment building and train it instead on the behemoth palm on Michael's bal-
cony.
In short, Michael was a born gardener. And now that we were the proud owners of a
small square of turf in Vieques, he set his jaw and resolved to bring order to the overgrown
mess we'd inherited from the previous owners.
While the garden to the west of the house contained a number of impressive fruit trees,
including breadfruit, avocado, lime and mango, it also boasted a variety of highly unusual
garden ornaments:
• three massive concrete pylons originally intended (we were told) to support a cistern be-
fore the project was abandoned
• random blobs of concrete that had been unceremoniously dumped into the garden at the
conclusion of earlier construction jobs
• a highly-visible septic tank
• and the rusted chassis of an old car
We had dealt with these eyesores as methodically as possible. The concrete pylons,
which we dubbed 'Stonehenge South,' had been the first to go—Daniel had overseen their
dismantling during his brief tenure. He had also made sure the concrete blobs disappeared.
During her first months on the job Jane had hired a couple of guys to hack their way
through the gnarly thicket that had become our side yard. They had disentangled the Buick
from the thick undergrowth and a flatbed truck had carted it to the local landfill.
She then more or less reversed this process to solve the septic tank problem; instead of
hacking vines away, she encouraged them to run rampant over the offending structure until
it was barely visible from the upstairs balcony.
As she often said, nature happens fast in Vieques.
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