My Neighbor Won’t Turn Off His Sprinkler

Sweat and rain mix in my hair and drip down my face, stinging my eyes. The rain feels better than usual since we’ve had so little during the drought. As I pull my knee up to my chest to stretch it out, I see it again: the neighbor’s sprinkler is on. It was on when I left too, an hour ago. Rain pours down onto his deeply green lawn, crashing against the water particles being shot up into the sky by his eager sprinkler. Countervailing forces, every pair of water droplets is like an experiment of two bullets being shot at each other to see if they’ll split.

The neighbor, let’s call him George, is an old man. When my family first moved to Denver, 15 or so years ago, he was already old. His dogs would often escape from his crumbling backyard gate, turning into a game between my parents and me where we determined who had to go help George corral the animal based on who had done it last time.

I remember George mowing his lawn when I was younger, he was still doing it himself in those days. It was green, as was everyone else’s, and he took pride in the finely manicured slopes of Kentucky Bluegrass that hugged his house on the corner lot. I’ve always appreciated the trees and flowers he’d plant. We wouldn’t talk really, but I’d wave to him as I walked the dog by his place.

My memories of Toronto, where I grew up, feel very green and humid. In the winter, I’d trudge through brown snowbanks on my way to school that waxed and waned, but never really left until the spring thaw, when the green returned. The first few minutes of my kindergarten class, my mom would tell me, mostly consisted of helping all the children take off their puffy zip-up snowsuits.

We go back to Toronto every summer to visit family. Last time I was there, I went on another rainy run in High Park, a hilly and densely forested 400 acres where old oaks and pines hang over you imposingly. There was too much rain that day, my shoes and underwear soaked right through and I dripped water on my grandparents’ carpet. My raincoat was rendered useless, equally wet inside and out.

We never really get rain like that in Denver. As a teenager, I was grateful for the milder days and that we had largely left the snowbanks behind, save for a few storms every year that brought tree branches crashing to the ground but then promptly melted away within days.

I feel a tinge of pain in my hip, bending a little too far during one of my stretches in our uneven driveway. I go inside, needing a glass of water and someone to complain to. My dad starts telling me he saw George out of the house earlier today, a rarity given his now-lack of activity. He was riding a mobility scooter towing his dog alongside. Though my dad’s description was more the dog towing the scooter, a muscular chocolate lab jerking George left and right as the animal plodded around on the greenery.

I had thought the dog was dead. I’d been out of town for a few months several times over the last year or so and hadn’t seen the dog out at all since I’d returned. At least all the times we recaptured the dog were seemingly worth it, still providing George with companionship if also some stress. I hadn’t really seen George out at all either since my return. The thirsty lawn he used to lovingly obsess over himself was now cut by a middle-aged man who pulled up in a pickup truck once every couple weeks, parked the wrong way, lit a cigarette, and noisily went about his work.

On the drive home from my most recent multi-month excursion, my girlfriend and I stopped in two of Utah’s beautiful national parks. In Zion, water literally seeped from the walls of the rock above a winding river in a place that felt otherworldly. I felt in my gut the awe early settlers must have felt, sensing that the only thing they could name this beautiful and life-giving place after was something that is not of this planet; Zion, the dwelling place of God.

The next day, in Capitol Reef, I stood over a sun-soaked informational placard about the history of farming in the valley. In the 1880s, Mormon settlers revitalized irrigation ditches dug by Native Americans who once farmed there. In the midst of the desert, families grew beans, peas, squash, lettuce, radishes, corn, and watermelons. By the 1970s, the last of the settlers had left the area, selling their homes to the government who would turn the area into the National Park it is today. The fruit trees, and the irrigation ditches, remain.

We drove another mile down the road, turning off the one lane highway into a stubby parking lot marked ‘Petroglyphs’. A rickety wooden walkway meandered along a little creek, and on the rock faces above us were images carved into 200-million year old layers of sedimentary rock. Bighorn sheep, and trapezoidal bodies with elaborate headdresses, stared back at us.

Driving home, Utah’s desert rolled by our car windows in shades of red, cream, and shrubby green for a hundred miles without so much as a house, much less any water. My girlfriend took the chance to sleep, having woken up early for the day’s exploring. I drove, seeing nobody, wondering whether people were meant to be here at all.

Hours later, now only minutes away from home, we drove by well-manicured homes with dusty lawns out front, mostly dead. Every few blocks we’d see a green lawn, indifferent to the shrinking reservoirs a hundred miles away, or the lack of snowpack to replenish them.

The following weekend, I park my car at the garden center. It’s a different one this year than my usual, as I’ve swapped out my plans for the thirsty vegetable garden, instead opting for a selection of native plants. I fill my squeaky cart with Rocky Mountain Penstemons, Gazania, and Catmint, as a nice older lady tells me about her experiences planting gardens in Denver for the last half-century. “There’s nothing here I haven’t planted,” she tells me, peering around the fenced in outdoor area. I smile politely and nod.

Back home, I recruit my brother to help me dig through our front yard’s compacted clay. We only have 9 or 10 small plants to get in the ground, but it’s slow going. The soil wouldn’t take well to plant growth without some amending. Running my hands through it felt more like gravel than dirt. Sweating as the sun beat down on us, we finally get the holes deep enough while avoiding hammering our shovels into a gas line underneath, marked by an unreadably decrepit little flag. We sprinkle in some compost, shake the plants out of their plastic casings, and fill back in the soil.

Waiting until the sun sets, we go out with a couple pitchers full of water. We picked the plants for their resilience, but they need a year of watering to establish themselves before they become self-reliant, the woman from the garden center had told me. Across the street, I hear George’s sprinkler start up. My brother and I dribble water over the tender shoots in the warm evening air. Every droplet that rolls off onto the driveway makes me wince.