Last week, the kid who waters all the flower beds in my yard, front and back, came on Monday night and then agreed that he would be back on Thursday afternoon. Thursday afternoon came and went, and he didn’t show, so I texted him and he said he’d come after work. (He got a job at McDonald’s over the summer, and has kept it since he started school again, so he’s pretty busy.) He texted me at 11:30 that night to say he’d just gotten off and his parents didn’t want him staying out so late, so he would come the next day (Friday) on his lunch break (McDonald’s is just across Balboa from my house) at 6:30. He didn’t. And I haven’t heard from him since.

I purposely waited to see how long it would take him to come back to me with an apology, an excuse, and a future date, but this time it didn’t happen. He has always been later than he said he would be, by an hour or two to a day or two, but he has always come up with a “good reason” for the delay and has showed up at some point. But I guess, given a regular minimum wage salary, he no longer has to prioritize weekly “pocket money” from me (although he was always most anxious to collect that on time!).

I thought about texting to rebuke him for ghosting me and giving me no notice so that I could find someone else to water, but then my stubborn, prideful side struck and I thought, No way am I going to appear needy or pathetic in front of this kid, so I decided to suck it up and try to do the watering myself.

Gone are the days of dashing out to the yard, hauling the hose over to the flower bed, turning on the water, then leaping back up the steps into the kitchen to do other stuff while the bed filled up; that’s still the basic process, but now it’s a carefully negotiated step-down-step-down with cane in one hand and the other hand on the back of a strategically placed chair, followed by a slow and cautious progression out to the faucet with the aid of my walker; a laborious unrolling of the hose and a slow drag over to the first destination; a hobbling return to the faucet to turn it on (if I turn it on before dragging it, I can’t control my walker and the direction of the hose at the same time and inevitably drench my bandaged feet), and then a return, via walker and cane, into the house, to collapse exhausted at the kitchen table.

Once there, I set the timer on my phone for 30 minutes and make myself some breakfast or do a few dishes, or go into the studio to check email and scroll Facebook. Then I have to navigate back down the steps and out the side patio door to move the hose to the next bed, then the next, ending with the “orchard” (the back third of my yard is planted in fruit trees), and after the timed interval there, I turn off the hose, leaving it where it lies, and return a last time to the kitchen chair for a much-needed rest. It still amazes me, even after half a dozen years of progressively less mobility, that it’s so difficult and takes so long to do what I used to accomplish as an incidental side project without even thinking about it.

My bigger problem, however, isn’t the back yard but the front: There are three steps, much more steep than the back-door set; the hose is harder to maneuver, the beds more problematical to fill (they are shallow and the soil is clay, so I have to stand—or sit on my walker—and hand water them so they don’t overflow and send the soil running down the driveway with the excess water); and one of the beds is on the other side of the driveway (and the parked car). But after four more days with no word from the errant teenager, I decided I had to give it a try or risk my David Austin roses, my gardenia and camellia bushes, and my plumeria wilting and dying from drought, so on Wednesday morning, out I went.

I did the David Austins on the west side of the house first, then dragged the hose into the long front flower bed to fill and sat down on my walker in front of the porch to wait, while trying to figure out how I was going to manage the eastern bed without getting myself wet or falling down.

Wednesdays are trash days, but only the black-can truck had come so far; as I sat there, a homeless man turned up with a shopping cart full of redeemable recyclables, said “Good morning” to me and started going through my blue bin. I decided to strike up a conversation with him; he was fairly young, relatively clean, and respectful in his manner, and I’m always curious to hear people’s stories. So we discussed the weather and our health situations (could be better, could be worse), and progressed naturally into a conversation about how often the flower beds needed watering in this heat. I mentioned that the kid who usually waters for me seemed to have bailed, so I was out doing it myself, and he hesitantly offered to help. He confided that he was homeless, and said he helped out two other people in my neighborhood with small jobs around the outside of the house. He didn’t even mention payment, but it occurred to me that it would be much more satisfying to help out this guy than it was my (somewhat privileged and kinda flaky) teen boy.

Some people would probably hesitate, thinking long and hard about whether to hire someone in that situation, but I have a lot of experience of the homeless community from my days working in a public library, where they congregate to take advantage of the air conditioning in summer, the heating in winter, and the free internet. This seemed like a regular guy, down on his luck (he said he had a thriving handyman business until the pandemic hit and he lost all his clients and couldn’t pay for his place), and it occurred to me that he would have more incentive to be reliable than did another teenager with multiple other priorities. So we agreed that when he comes by to collect recyclables each week on trash day, he would stop at my house to water all my flower beds, front and back, and in return I would pay him with Ralph’s grocery cards (since he can’t cash a check and I can’t get out to get cash from the bank but can order gift cards through the mail).

I really hate to relinquish more autonomy than I absolutely have to, but it’s a fact that navigating the front yard is a bigger and more dangerous challenge than I am willing to take on. I went out this morning to water in the back yard and got through it without incident, but I’ll be happy to have the help on Wednesday. And if things work out with this specific task and Jonathan (that’s his name) proves reliable, perhaps I can make use of some of his handyman skills as well and we can be mutually helpful.

This morning I started reading a new book series—international mysteries featuring a British Interpol agent as protagonist—and at one point she is giving a sort of pep talk to her new team and mentions that they need to “convert defeat into opportunity.” I decided to take that as a sign to both push myself a bit harder and also to take the assistance being offered by the universe or serendipity or trash day on Bassett Street.