So a weird thing happened to us a couple of weeks ago and I’m just now over the trauma of it enough to blog about it.
Someone shat in our backyard.
Specifically, someone took a poo in the teeny tiny space between our neighbor’s fence and our storage shed. Just feet, or maybe yards, I don’t know, I’m not good with spatial measuring, but alarmingly close to our house.
Don’t worry. I did not take pictures of the excrement.
It was, ostensibly, a lovely weekend morning. My head gardener XFE and I were doing a little sprucing of the back patio area. He wanted to get rid of some evergreen, bush thingys, and transplant a nice but overgrown sage from our front “yard.” (It’s really not a yard but an oversized vegetable box, I guess you’d call it).
Because we didn’t want to carry the two evergreen bushy things through the house, we had to use the very narrow space by the shed to carry the items out to the back alley and around to the front of the house and the street curb for eventual pick up. I was given that honor.
It wasn’t until I was coming back from my first bush trip around the house that XFE spotted it. Actually, first he asked, “where are all these flies coming from.” Then he saw the source. A dark and substantial streak of dried fecal matter running down the side of our lovely light blue shed, and pooling down around a drain overflow pipe. There were also used restaurant napkins, if you catch my drift. We could only speculate on how long it had been there.
After much gagging (XFE) and incredulous eye bulging (me), XFE, ever the gallant gentlemen, used a plastic bag to pick up and dispose of the restaurant napkins. Our high power water nozzle was deployed and XFE set to work removing all signs of the stain. It took forever (he was quite thorough), but his work was flawless and very much appreciated. I stood by with an outdoor broom and guided the water towards the patio drain.
It was quite the bonding morning. No one was in the mood for breakfast after that.
But even more disturbing than the physical aspect is the fact that someone came onto our property to take a crap. We spent a lot of time (actually, mostly me. XFE really didn’t want to talk about it) discussing how and who and why such a thing could happen. My immediate thought was that it was some inconsiderate drunken club kid late at night while we were sleeping mere inches (ok, yards or even feet. I really struggle with this measuring thing) away. XFE’s way-more-logical theory is that it was a construction worker of some sort working on a project nearby.
Whichever, whatever, it felt so incredibly invasive. I’d almost rather they had broken into the place. (That is not a suggestion to any would be pooper-burglars. It was just a vulnerable moment for me).
By the way, the transplanted sage which had been the picture of health over the last two summers died within hours of being transplanted. Which is odd because I would have thought poo would be like, nature’s fertilizer or something.