Unseen Beauty: A Journal

Unlikely Beauty

I have neighbors. Yes, yes, everyone has neighbors in this suburban, claustrophobic world in which we live. But I have that kind of neighbors. The house next door isn’t a very large place, not much bigger than my own little 2 bedroom, yet there are always three or four cars out front in varying states of decay. In all honesty, I’m not too sure who exactly lives there or how many of them there are. The population seems to change on a regular basis. Their dogs regularly wander into my yard, and as much as it irritates me and my own pets, I remain grateful that it’s the dogs on my property and not the strange fellow with the yellow and black Mohawk.

For the most part, they’re rather innocuous. They work strange hours, and the lights are rarely on when I glance over at night. Occasionally, however, they have parties of the sort that make quiet, early-to-bed old farts like me rather homicidal. For a while, they held raucous pool parties, but recently they’ve stopped treating the water, and the pool has come to resemble the Bog of Eternal Stench, so no one has been swimming in it. Instead, they’ve moved their events out onto the front lawn. For some strange reason it seems, the lawn is preferable to the interior of the house. Perhaps there is not enough space inside the house for the volume of guests, or perhaps the house is completely composed of bedrooms for the crew that inhabits it. Regardless, four or five times a year, a party occupies the front yard, right next to my bedroom, and I have the pleasure of listening to drunken banter that threatens to kill brain cells merely by its proximity and hearing dueling banjos, rendered authentically on a pair of banjos, at two thirty in the morning.

They threw one of those lovely galas on New Year’s Eve. In all honesty, I could not begrudge them a celebration of the turning of the spring of time - at first. However, by around three thirty in the morning, I was more than a little tired of the slurred repetition of “Ha-pee New Year” and “Man, you are so friggin’ smashed.” I admit it, by that point, I begrudged them the celebration of the New Year. In fact, I recall asking the Lord why he had not included a remote control with a mute button for human beings in the original plan for creation.

The next morning I crawled out of bed a few hours later than usual, still a bit bleary from my late bedtime and the repeated unorthodox wake up calls from behind the bedroom wall. Irritated, I stumbled over to the window facing the neighbors’ property and peered through the blinds at the fringe of scrubby trees overhanging the chain link fence and the line of beer-can filled trash cans huddled against the tan-painted concrete block. And then I noticed the bush between the trash cans and the fence.

It was a scraggly shrub perhaps four and a half feet high, its thin branches clearly visible as they stretched up from the sandy Florida soil. A memorial to holidays long past, the bush had doubtless started as one of those catch-all gifts: the traditional poinsettia-in-a-pot that one is never quite sure what to do with. Obviously, my neighbors had done better than I – they had planted their poinsettia next to their back yard fence, and the hearty little plant had flourished.

The poinsettia bush was certainly not lush. It fell far short of the rich plenty of verdure exhibited by the carefully cultivated poinsettias I had seen in Christmas displays in Orlando earlier in the month. Yet it survived and grew, tucked away between the garbage cans and the back yard. And more than that, atop the thin spindly branches, a rich green canopy of leaves spread out to the sun, crowned by a pair of brilliant red poinsettias. Even in the least likely place, unexpected beauty and grace in difficult soil. The plant, discarded in a far less than perfect situation, could not help but try; how could I do less?