You probably don’t know this about the garden. It’s not like they would have told you when you closed on the house. They just care about making the sale. Anyway, by this time next week, all the flowers will be dead. Not just finished blooming. The plants themselves will have shriveled into brown and crunchy sticks.  

Yeah, I saw the delivery truck with the big order of annuals from Fishken’s nursery a few days ago. They’ll stay alive for a few more days, so enjoy them while you can.

Anyway, welcome to the neighborhood! Sorry to be the bearer of bad news about the garden. That’s just how it is. The house itself is quite nice, though, I hear. Don’t you love that little stained glass window in the front bedroom walk in closet? I look at it whenever I go by on my evening walks. It’s hard to tell, looking through stained glass, but I usually see someone moving inside, even when nobody is home. I like to think that it’s Maria Elena, the fifteen year old girl who they say died of consumption back in eighteen ninety two. It was such a sad story. She wrote poetry, you know, until her strength gave out and she couldn’t even hold a pen any more. Such a shame. But that closet used to be part of her bedroom, before they remodeled the house.

Is there still a big pantry off the kitchen? They didn’t remodel that. Kitchens used to be so different in the old days. They kept all sorts of things in the pantry. I don’t think they knew much about food safety in those days. Rumor has it that Jerome Conrad died of ptomaine poisoning from eating some bad cheese back in eighteen thirty seven. Of course, some said that his young wife had poisoned him, and there is something to that, as well.

They said that she was a beauty, the wife, Penelope, but a wild one. So she could have done it.  The story I heard was that after he died, the house was sold and she moved back to Philadelphia. 

That house – your house now – is obviously the oldest one in the neighborhood. The rest of this used to be farmland, until a developer took it on. I’ve lived here all my life, in that blue house second from the corner. My dad bought it on spec when they were first doing the development. But I remember the families that have lived in your house. Nobody lasted very long. For a while, my best friend Todd lived there. That’s how I know what the inside of the house looks like. He told me about weird noises and things moved from where you put them, but he liked to tell stories to scare kids younger than himself, and I always believed every word he said. They moved away, though. When Todd’s little sister Angie died of leukemia, his mother couldn’t stand to be in the same house. Everything reminded her of Angie, she said. She even said that to me, and I was just her son’s eleven year old friend. So they moved to Albuquerque and Todd and I lost touch. Kids don’t write to each other, at least we didn’t.

Anyway, like I said, welcome to the neighborhood.  I hope that your time living in the house is better than it was for the Gideons, the ones that sold it to you. They thought they knew what they were getting into, but it was too much for them. I can’t say any more about that, but you’ll hear from someone about it. Best of luck to you.