It would be a heist.
We’re standing on the sidewalk at the edge of the lot where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Master Builder Harold Turner built a beautiful house in 1959. Walking past it, we admire its large windows, its brick and wood and its slanting roof that seems to flow down toward the road. The house harmonizes with the piece of ground it sits on. It’s an important house, but what we’re really looking at this morning, what we’re looking for, are the trillium.
Most of the yard sloping down hill from the house is not landscaped. It’s virgin ground that’s been left alone. In the 30 some years that we’ve walked past it, searching for the delicate white flowers in May, the trillium patch has been getting smaller and smaller, while the houses up and down Lone Pine Road–all over the area, really–have been getting bigger and bigger, decidedly grandiose. Next door to what Tizi calls “the trillium house” sits a Frenchy-looking country house; a mansion. Currently under construction, it will be big enough to eat the Turner house for lunch. To build this monstrosity they had to destroy all the trees and all the vegetation on the lot. This morning at the edge of that property, where we stand next to the devastation, we find four trillium plants. The last of them.
“We should get these,” I say to Tizi. Dig them up and take them home.
“We can’t,” she says.
I hum the first few notes of “Mission Impossible.” Then whisper: “A night operation. We’d park right over there on Cliffwood. Shut the car lights off. Keep the engine running.”
“No.”
“You’ll stay in the car. I’ll wear all black. Put black stuff on my face.”
“Stuff.”
“Whatever they use. I don’t know. Shoe polish?”
I know it’s against the law to swipe trillium.
“It’s against the law to swipe trillium,” she reminds me.
“It would be a rescue. We would be preserving them. Saving them.”
“We could ask,” she says. “I think the homeowner can give permission.”
“Where did the rest of them go? There used to be scads of them. Someone must have absconded with them.”
She pinches my sleeve. “Let’s go.”
“There’s no sign. No ‘please don’t pick the trillium.’ Maybe they don’t care.”
Tizi cares. A lot. We have a small patch of trillium on the south side of our house, most of them purchased, a few pilfered 15-20 years ago in the twilight hours one spring evening, from a stand of trees along M-53. A co-worker tipped her off. Better get them, he said. There’s a subdivision going in there. We went. It was a haul. She planted them, and they thrived (I’d like to say they throve), until we thought we might lose them when we lost a tree. It was a tall shady silver maple, bifurcated, that threatened to split and fall on the house. We took it out, without prejudice. With it went the shade.
“We need shade,” she said. “Look at them.”
The blossoms were long gone. It was June. Of course the trillium were stlll there. I thought they’d be all right.
“They need shade,” she said. “What about an umbrella?”
“They’ll be all right. They just look gone because it’s June.”
“We could get one of those big umbrellas.”
She meant patio size. I pictured a giant umbrella for the trillium, right next to the back porch, shading the trillium and her wildflower garden. It would look weird. The umbrella would take flight in a wind storm. I saw myself in a downpour running after it, cursing the trillium.
We ended up planting a Bradford pear tree where the maple was. In all these years the pear tree has grown tall, not wide. It’s a spike, like a tall umbrella that doesn’t open. It produces a slice of shade. But our trillium don’t seem to care. They have thrived. (I’d like to say thriven.)
We move on from the Turner house, past the French monstrosity, walk up Sodon Lake Road. A misnomer, it’s a road without a lake. What it does have are more big houses and riches in flowering trees. There’s lilac, redbud, flowering crab, dogwood in front, side, and back yards. All of these trees look more robust than our spear of a pear tree.
“Our pear is pathetic,” I say.
“No, it isn’t.”
We’re heading for another stretch of road called Pine Tree Trail, where Tizi’s favorite dog lived, Scout the collie, and his/its mother/mistress, Deborah. When we come over the top of the hill, Deborah’s lot comes into view. Deborah is long gone. Scout is long gone. Deborah told us she was re-marrying and moving to a lake somewhere. Her house has been torn down, to make room for a new monstrosity. On this section of Pine Tree Trail there’s old and new; old smallish houses, most of them ranches (referred to as “tear-downs”) that fit on their lots, and new construction that’s ostentatious, grievously over-sized. Next to Scout and Deborah’s there are three in a row, one on top of the other. Country houses without the country, which makes them seem, well, illegitimate.
“He’s gone,” she says. Meaning Scout. “I wonder what they’ll build here?”
“Something ugly.”
“If it’s the guy who lives next door’s builder,” she says. She kicks some gravel on the side of the road and says she misses Scout.
“Ou sont les chiens d’antan?” I say. If we’re going to be melancholy we might as well be lyrical. “Wasn’t that a song?”
“Neiges. Where are the snows of yesteryear.”
“From the musical?”
“Yes, a musical,” she says. “Which, I don’t remember.”
A couple houses farther down the road, in front of a long vintage 1960’s ranch whose days are numbered, the homeowner has placed a sign warning off dogwalkers. It’s exactly like a sign I wanted to design. This was years ago. I was still mowing the lawn. And it was before consciousness was raised and consideration awakened in dog owners. I’d stepped in it a few times.
“Remember I wanted to design a sign like that?”
A shrug.
“The European style sign, an image with a diagonal line through it? No words.”
Eyeroll.
“Funny, but to the point. If only there had been AI back then. We could have made millions.”
“I’m sure someone had already thought of that.” She points to a redbud, says they’re all over the place. She never noticed how many.
“We’d’ve made millions,” I say. Can you patent an image? Like trademark?”
“Would you want a dog taking a crap to be your trademark?”
When we reach Kirk of the Hills, the sprawling gothic Presbyterian church on Long Lake Road, we take the loop past the church. The grounds are golf course quality, neatly mowed, the flower beds picture perfect. It’s not a place for trillium’s modest beauty that hides more than it calls attention to itself. Next to one of the parking lots a Bradford pear is in voluptuous blossom.
“I wish ours looked like that,” I say.
“Ours is nice.”
“It’s a spear. Does it even blossom?”
“Of course it does.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
We take turns, she and I, expressing blossom envy. She says everyone’s redbuds are better than ours; I say everyone’s Bradford is better than ours. This morning the Kirk’s Bradford pear over there is full of birds. Even I can hear the screeching and singing.
“Birdatory,” I say, pointing at the tree.
Back home, while I put on lunch she stands at the bay window in the back of the house, looking at her trillium patch. We’ve got white, burgundy, pink, yellow, and yellow-green.
“You know what would be cool?” I ask.
“We get more every year,” she says. “Its like they’re reproducing. They must be happy.”
“Black trillium.”
“My purple one’s almost black.”
“I mean black black.” Black trillium. Rare among the rare. Behind the house we would be the only ones to see it.
For fun I reprise a few bars of Mission Impossible. “A covert operation,” I say. “The final four.”
Another year they might not be there.
