Zampano Hill

Zampano Hill, the slope behind my house, has been slashed, whacked, chopped and chain-sawed. Where ivy circled the birdbath and feral cats hid from raccoons in the thick tangle of pampas grass, a new order will have to be established. The squirrels will have to take detours. Next time the skunk leaves a message for me, he’ll probably have to run away along the ditch, no more fruitless mulberry to hide behind. And the Blue Jay, that shrieking puffball of indignation, when he comes back later in the spring, he’ll have to complain from somewhere else because his swaying oleander lookout has been deconstructed. Only the mocking bird will be happy; he can still practice at four every morning since the pine tree has been labeled as “growing to the ground, not falling to the ground.” The tree specialist said I could sleep in the back bedroom again, even during a storm. And you, dear musical mocker, will see to it from your seat at the top of the pinecone factory, that I will be awakened early.
At the end of last year I surrendered my rights to the hill. I had tripped and rolled several feet down into the junipers during an intense weeding project. While I had been trapped in this prickly nest I assessed the impact, and I admitted to myself that I was getting too old to control the landscape. Let the community administrator take care of it.
Yesterday trucks lined up in the street and men came to clear Zampano Hill. Oh yes, they did clear the hill.
“Please, mind the water pipe that runs up the side.”
“Yes.”
“And the bench. Don’t take away the bench. That’s where I meditate.”
“Yes.”
“I used to grow tulips up there. And daffodils”
“Yes.”
I sounded pathetic. What do men with chain saws care about the stories that hide in the pyracanthas, stories that bend under sagging redwood boards, stories that glow purplish when the sun wakes the morning glories?
“Yes.” The young man nodded and cut into the ivy- covered branches of my chestnut tree.
That’s when I realized that he didn’t understand me. The man in poison green safety vest and orange pant protectors who stabbed his shears into my paradise didn’t speak my language at all. And suddenly I was embarrassed by my passionate plea.
Later, when he piled pampas grass stalks into a heap, when his saw stuttered through brittle rosemary bushes and juicy yucca stems, when he reduced a canopy of oleander into short naked stubs, I watched. I followed his moves like a stalker, from the back porch, then from the bathroom, then from behind the blinds in the kitchen .A mad woman who had lost control over her past and her common sense.
The spiraling, bursting, crazy components of my thoughts spun themselves into a bullet and propelled me toward a bookcase of journals and photo albums. For the rest of the day I ripped pictures from yellowing pages and copied fragments of events into a computer list. I tried to collect twenty years of memories while the man on the hill slashed their concrete expressions.
When I moved into Timber Cove in November of 1987 I had envisioned ribbons of red geraniums trailing down from the hillside, but soon learned that the area had once been a dumpsite and leftover toxic waste made for a difficult environment. The previous owners must have gathered enough information to plant accordingly – mainly evergreens and ivy.
They had attached a rope to the fence at the very top. The only way to climb the steep terrain was to hold on to the rope. I cut steps and walkways into the rocky ground. The next year I cleared a small platform at the top for a table and chairs. A couple of seasons later, by the time my grandchildren were able to walk, we had picnics on the hill and Easter egg hunts, and chats with blue jays, squirrels, and the hissing mothers of wild kittens. I bought a rainbow colored umbrella.
By trial and error I learned what the ground rejected and what it would support. The few geraniums I planted didn’t last because it was too hard and too dry. I hauled soil and fertilizer up the hill for a bed of red poppies. They only bloomed one season. A grouping of gladiolas looked pretty for a while, until they tilted and leaned into each other. But one day I bought a bag of bearded iris rhizomes from a catalog. Must have been fifteen years ago and still, every April, some of them sprout their lavender and white flower heads on sturdy upright stems. And the naked ladies – I don’t know where they came from – they shoot into the air, three of them, or five, or sometimes seven, every August.
Joe used to carry a blanket up the hill to keep me warm when we watched the stars together. He sprinkled the walkway with rose petals when I was in a bad mood. We chalked messages for each other on a big sandstone rock or scribbled them on the backside of seedling envelopes and stuck them in a toy mailbox. We built a tiny deck by the pine tree and watched the mother cat drag her kittens into the dugout below.
After Joe’s death I found five empty vodka bottles in a shallow grave. No matter what I planted in his memory – it died. First the weeping cherry. Then the crabapple tree. Fifty red tulips only bloomed once. Even the daffodils succumbed to an overdose of oxidized metals or maybe they were killed by his ashes.
The only thing that is left of him on the hill is the sundial. It remembers that he died at 1:30 in the afternoon. I can still see him the way he looked the last time he climbed all the way up – haggard – half his weight lost to cancer. He carried a piece of hot dog wrapped in a napkin for the cats. After he sat down he pulled a flask from his coat pocket and loaded the syringe with vodka. Then he opened a can of Ensure and dumped its content into the bushes. I spied on him the way I spied on the landscaper yesterday, hiding my sadness behind the blinds.
Even before Joe’s restless spirit haunted the hill, my mother had taken her place among the Zampano ghosts. After she died in 1991 I imagined her gliding down from the clouds and landing in the corner where sunflowers tilted their heads with the time of the day. My mother loved sunflowers. And she loved the color purple. I can see her purple gauzy gown flutter in the wind. She shakes her finger at me, the way she used to do when I was a child.
“Vorwärts gehn,” she says. Go forward.
She always warns me when I climb too deeply into retrospect. Though I have only just begun my list of hillside memories I stop writing and walk outside. The men have hauled away a truckload of trees and bushes, have reduced the landscape to evergreens again. I climb to the top, clean a plastic chair with my bare hand, and sit until it begins to rain.