It all began with the tiny old Asian lady. I didn't give her a second thought when I saw her maroon car pull up in front of our house on an already hot June morning. We live on a busy residential and commercial street. I noticed her getting out of her car, but I was not alarmed. Instead, I appreciated her rather old fashioned attire. She was wearing a creme sun hat and a blue flowery print house dress. She appeared to be in her late fifties or early to mid sixties. Her face was rather tanned and weathered looking, as though she had spent much time outdoors.
I returned to watering and tending to the plants on our upstairs front porch. Several minutes had passed when I happened to see the lady walking away from our house as though she had been at the front door. I paused to watch her. Was she leaving us one of those personality questionnaires that we get every now and then from Scientologists? Or was she a Jehovah Witness who wanted to remind me that the end times are near? I watched her walk to her maroon car. She was carrying a medium sized plastic bag from JoAnn's. The bag was filled to its capacity with plums from our plum tree.
Kevin and I have a plum tree in our front yard that is nothing short of magnificent. Every year it produces so many plums that a couple of branches break from the weight of them. We give our friends and relatives plums. Kevin takes plums to work. We share them with our neighbors, and every year we meet a few nice strangers who ring our doorbell and ask us if we would mind their picking a few plums. Of course, the answer is always, "Not at all. We have more plums than we need." I have made plum preserves with them and used them in plum tarts and plum cobblers. We're proud of our plum tree, and it has provided us with many pleasant summer time memories.
What I was observing in my front yard right then, however, was far from pleasant. I stood frozen in amazement watching the tiny lady carefully place the bag of plums on her backseat floorboard. I thought that maybe she would look up before she drove away and that I would give her a withering and knowing glare. Here was a lady who did not bother to ring the doorbell and ask if she could pick some plums. No, she was stealing our plums and not just a few, but a whole bagful. Furthermore, her actions were apparently premeditated. She drove up to our house with her bag and her intent to steal.
Clutching my little green watering can, I continued to watch this lady, determined to catch her eye. She did not drive away. Instead, she pulled out a second plastic bag, this one from Kroger and walked back towards our house, disappearing from my sight. She was going back for more plums.
I had to say something to this lady to stop her, but I am anything but confrontational. It had been a difficult month. Kevin had been sick, things had been crazy, and it didn't look like I was going to have an opportunity to do much with the plums anyway. "No!" I told myself. It was the very principle of the thing. People just weren't supposed to do things like this.
I went downstairs and flung open the front door, startling the lady as she was filling up her Kroger bag. Before I even had a chance to speak, she backed away from the plum tree a bit and called out nervously, "I should pay you! I should pay you!" I told her not to worry about paying me but explained to her that we might like to use some of our plums and that I had seen that she already had another bag of them. She thrust out the Kroger bag as though she were going to give them back to me. "That's okay," I said. "You go on and enjoy them." She headed straight for her car and drove off. Thanks to her startled and embarrassed reaction, confronting her had turned out to be a lot easier than I had thought it would be.
After the plum lady left, I was not really angry, just astounded by the audacity of her actions. Then, at lunch that same day, Kevin's cousin suggested that she might be a vendor at the nearby Farmer's Market and that she planned to sell our plums as "local" and "organic." This theory may or may not have been true, but it felt true. Suddenly I felt foolish and naive. "You go on and enjoy them," I had said. Luckily, either the plum stealing lady got the message and stayed away, or I just never caught her again.
A couple of weeks later, my day lily began to bloom for the first time in the back yard. We had planted it last fall. The blooms were absolutely gorgeous--red with a yellow center. I was so proud that we had such beautiful flowers in our back yard for the first time. A few days after we saw the first blooms, I noticed that there appeared to be several places on the plant where blossoms seemed to have been cut right off. It appeared to be a clean cut as though someone holding a knife or a pair of scissors had done it. I couldn't believe my eyes. First the plum snatching lady and now this! Part of me was a bit flattered, thinking that whoever was doing this must find our flowers to be awfully beautiful and tempting, but as more and more blossoms disappeared, I just became furious again and more than a little freaked out. What was next? The house? I even put a lock on the gate in an attempt to deter the flower thief. I imagined our setting up a hidden cameras. It seemed to be the only way to catch this mean and mysterious person. I would lie in wait for him (for some reason I figured it was a he), and I would confront him, and this time I would be scary. Even if no one else did, this flower thief would learn that he had better not mess with me.
Around Father's Day I counted the number of times it looked like blossoms had been cut off my day lily. Sixteen. This was unbelievable unless...I looked around on the ground and found five or six wilted blossoms. What if the blossoms fell off and somehow looked as though they had been cut? A couple of days later I showed my day lily to my next door neighbor, who is an expert on flowers. She did an excellent job of not making me feel foolish when she told me that day lilies look like that when the wilted blossoms fall off. No flowers had been lost but apparently I had lost my mind. I took the lock off of our back yard gate. I decided to go inside and rest for a while.
