Not Alone in the Backyard

Sometimes you’re working late in the office you made out of your backyard garage. And sometimes the security light suddenly just blinks on. You can see it through the side window that allows you a look at a few measly square feet of the yard. Nothing is moving, at least within your view of the big, bad world outside. But something is clearly moving somewhere out there, because why else would the light have turned on?

So you sit there at your desk, but turned away from the computer to see if whatever tripped the light will make itself known. But even this is pretty dumb, you realize. Were it a skunk or a raccoon or a possum or a cat or whatever other four-legged creature wants to think that there’s something delicious buried beneath your geraniums, you wouldn’t be able to see it. The only thing you would see in through that window would be a person.

This is not a comforting thought.

The light turns off. Whatever was moving has left. Or it simply stopped when the light turned on and is waiting.

You can hear Highway 5 in your little garage. Does that seem odd? It’s not as if the highway runs through your backyard, but you can hear vehicles rumbling on by.

You can hear a train pulling out of the Glendale station. You’ve never actually seen the train, but the horn sounds often enough to remind you that it’s there.

You wonder if you even turned on the security light. Someone clearly did, but you cannot remember doing it. You usually don’t. It’s bright and you think it might annoy the neighbors. How considerate of you.

With the backyard light having blinked off, the only thing you can see in the side window is your own face, illuminated but the light of your monitors. If someone were looking in right now, you wouldn’t be able to tell. But they’d see you in a goddamn spotlight.

You remember that you looked down at the floor today and thought someone had spilled water. But the marks weren’t quite round, and upon closer inspection, they turned out to be the footprints of a cat that had walked through the dust. You followed the prints, and they went into Glen’s room, not yours, thank God. How long had that cat been here? When had it ventured inside?

The light blinks on again and you really wish it were windy tonight, because then you could say that the wind was blowing that big sage bush you have outside the garage. But it is not windy tonight, and you know that you will only find out what it making the light blink on by opening the door and checking yourself.

But you will not do this.

Halloween in March! (Or — Attack of the Sinister Spiders)

I hope everyone else finds the animal life in my backyard as interesting as I do.

A few days ago, I found that one of my pumpkins had gone soft. No biggie, really — I placed the thing out for Thanksgiving, and it's been sitting out ever since, holidays be damned. I decided to give it an honorable send off by chucking it into the wall in the back wall. And there it sat, a cracked Humpty Dumpty waiting for the birds to pick out its unborn children from its body cavity.

Today, I noticed that it had attracted visitors: orange-bodied, black-legged spiders that looked like a cross between your typical house arachnid and fire ants. They were swarming. It’s like they were having a party.

Can anyone tell me what these are? I’ve lived in California all my life and never noticed one of these, to say nothing of a sinister cluster of them. They’re not fire ants. I got a very close interaction with those when I moved in the backyard. And they don’t seem to be coming from a hole in the ground. In fact, it kind of looks like they came from inside the pumpkin.

Oh look, I have video too. They’re stars now, these little nightmares.

The backyard beat, previously:

• An Open Letter to a Skunk
• Things I Found Buried in My Backyard
• How to Destroy Your Toe
• She Everywhere 2: Return to the Raccoon House
• What Do You Do With a Dying Monarch?

How to Remove a Wasp’s Nest — the Drew Mackie Way!

(Inspired by actual events.)

1. Head out to the garage. See that a wasp is building a nest in the door frame.
2. Use the Lord’s name in vain.
3. Stand there watching it, in hopes that it will reveal its secret weakness.
4. Return inside. Google “how to remove a wasp nest.” Quickly tire of this.
5. Emboldened by boredom, decide that you can swat it down. After all, you killed that fly on your own.
6. Go to the utility closet and find the long-handled tool you least care about being infected with wasp evil. Decide on the Swiffer that came with the house, as you no longer have any Swiffer strips anyway.
7. Return outside, Swiffer in hand, to find that the wasp is lying in wait for you. 
8. Decide to simply take out the wasp.
9. Swing. 
10. Miss.
11. Drop the Swiffer and run inside.
12. Lock the door for some reason.
13. Watch some TV, occasionally peering out the back door to see if the wasp is still mad.
14. Have some wine, then turn in for the night.
15. Head out to the garage in the morning, find the Swiffer lying in the dirt.
16. “Goddammit, Glen, why is the Swiffer out here on the — oh, wait, never mind.”
17. Not seeing the wasp, you decide to take another swipe at the nest. It falls to the ground without incident. Nothing appears to be inside. You think about that Calvin & Hobbes with the dead bird for a second.
18. Note that there are other wasp nests along the garage overhang, just none others specifically near where you need to enter.
19. Decide that the wasps can just have the garage in the same manner in which you ceded the toolshed to the spiders.
20. Stay inside forever.

This, by the way, is the thematic sequel to my other instructional post, “How to Actually Fold a Fitted Sheet.”

The backyard beat, previously:

• An Open Letter to a Skunk
• Things I Found Buried in My Backyard
• How to Destroy Your Toe
• She Everywhere 2: Return to the Raccoon House
• What Do You Do With a Dying Monarch?

What Do You Do With a Dying Monarch?

At first I thought it was a leaf caught in the wind, but when it landed in my hand, I could see that it was moving too regularly. No, it was a monarch butterfly that had either run out of time or seen some serious action. Its wings were smashed. A few of its legs had been lopped off. It was broken. It seemed to move with great difficulty.

But it was moving, at least.

My first reaction was to just squish its little head, to save it from the pain, but I couldn’t do that. I’m honestly unsure that butterflies can feel pain. Besides, looking into its big eyes, I felt like it wasn’t my place. However, I also couldn’t leave it alone. So I just stood there, watching him beat his wings as he rested in my hand.

I put the butterfly on a cement paver — yes, that cement paver, actually — and just sat next to it. It didn’t care or probably even know, I realize. I’m totally projecting that it wanted me there. I would have wanted someone there.





I took some videos of what happened. That seemed important. Sometimes it was looking directly at me.

I’d never gotten so close to a butterfly for so long. I’d never gotten such a close look at one. You’d think it would look alien, but butterflies are more people-y than other insects; their proportions make them easier to anthropomorphize in your head.

Sometimes it seemed like it was struggling to do something. I couldn't tell what.

And then it eventually stopped struggling.

I put it on an orange kalanchoe when it stopped moving. Last I checked, it was still there.

So what spiritually devastating thing happened to you today?

She Everywhere 2: Return to the Raccoon House

Earlier this year, I thrilled dozens with the story of how I learned that a woman in my neighborhood was apparently devoured by raccoons. Yes, the devouring happened posthumously, but that adverbs saps a bit of the power from the phrase “devoured by raccoons,” doesn’t it?

Today I present to you a new chapter in the “She Everywhere” saga that involves avocados and more hyper-local urban legends.

For most of the end of summer, I was tearing out my front lawn to replace it with plants that require less water. One day, when I was barefoot and covered in dirt, a nice gay couple pulled up. Both the guys were about my age, and they came bearing a grocery bag of avocados, because that’s how you make a grand, neighborly gesture in California. They explained that they’d seen me working in the yard and wanted to welcome me to the neighborhood. I asked where they lived and they said they lived just nearby — “in a house around the corner.”

“Is it the white one with all the plants in front?”

They said that it was. And at that moment, I knew I was talking to the very “two guys, no wifes” that had moved into the Raccoon House. I didn’t say anything about it. There’s no graceful way to ask that one: “So is it true that the previous owner was ripped to shreds in your backyard?”

They left, and those avocados sat on the counter for about a week before I got hungry enough to try produce that was maybe-possibly-probably fertilized by spinster corpse. They were damn good avocados, I’m happy to report. That’s a lesson to all you backyard farmers out there: If you want tasty avocados, kill an unmarried woman.

Our houses being so close to each other, we’ve had reason to say hi a few more times, and eventually they had me over for drinks. Remember when I said there was no graceful way to inquire about the on-site death? Well, when I drink, I get less graceful, and it didn’t take long for a question about the previous owner to segue into this crazy story I’d heard about the property.

And this is where it gets awkward.

The one guy said he’d never heard anything like that. The other guy nodded and said, “Yeah, actually, the lady who lived here before also died here.” I asked if the story about the yard was true, and he said to his understanding, no. What actually happened was even worse. According to him, the previous owner was a hoarder who’d let the house fall into a state of disrepair. She did die on the property, but not in the backyard: she died inside. But the house was in such a state that it wasn’t secure from the various outside elements, and though the animals did eventually get to her, they got to her inside the house — not in the backyard.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

The first guy wanted to know why he hadn’t been informed of the circumstances of the vacancy, and the other guy explained that he assumed he’d rather not know. Which he did now. Because I brought it up.

I suppose the moral of this chapter might be that I am a terrible guest, but the story isn’t over yet. Even the “she everywhere inside the house” version of the story didn’t come from the realtor. That’s just what a neighbor said. Apparently, unless the on-site death resulted from murder or suicide, the seller isn’t required to divulge details to the buyer. At least Two Guys, No Wifes didn’t get them, anyway, just that someone had died, with no mention of the role of raccoons.

Now I wonder how difficult it would be to get those details — literal gory details, for the first time since I quit my job at the newspaper.

Now I also wonder why anyone invites me anywhere, really.

Previous funny stories about awful things:

• The Haunted Clock
• “Megan Is Fat.”
• Things I Found Buried in My Yard
• The Death of a Swan
• The Time I Hit a Cat in the Butt With an Orange

Things I Found Buried in My Yard

The house was built in 1942. Apparently no one picked up after themselves beween then and 2014. So far I have found…

so much broken glass, so many rusted nails

a mystery marble

a detached rosary crucifix

another mystery marble

a screw-off top to a wine brand that could date back to 1939

the corpse of motherfucking groot

So tell me, super sleuths: What cautionary tale are the ghosts in my yard trying to tell me? What story do these clues tell you?

“She Everywhere.”

I’m entering my third month of life in my new house. The move has presented me with a whole host of new experiences, new people and new ways I can hurt myself performing manual labor. And while I’ve learned a lot — don’t drop cement pavers on your big toe, for example — the biggest life lesson comes from the following short story.

One Thursday evening I was repairing some irrigation pipes in the front yard when my neighbor came by to make conversation with me. My neighbor is my new favorite person. She knows everything about my new neighborhood, and she relays this information — positive, negative, banal and bizarre — with the same inflection, as if she loves telling all stories, regardless of the content, and that none of her stories seem more or less strange to her than the other. They all have value. They must all be told. (In a similar sense, she also loves all colors equally, provided they look like ones you might see on some rare jungle flower, and I feel I don’t often enough see such chromatic boldness. You could learn a lesson from her, reader wearing head-to-toe taupe.)

One story had ended and another began with this sentence: “You know the house around the corner? The white one? With the pretty plants?”

I said that I did.

“Well, no one want to buy it when it for sale.”

The house is admirably done-up, and so I asked why anyone wouldn’t want to live there.

“The lady who own it before, she have no husband. And she out gardening one day, and she die back there. And, you know, no husband, so no one know. No one miss her.”

A shrug.

“And then they get her.”

I asked who “they” were. She seemed to search for the word.

“No eskunk… but the other one. You know…”

I guessed it was “raccoon.”

“Yes. Raccoon. The raccoon get her.”

I grew increasingly worried about the direction this story was taking, but my neighbor seemed unfazed by it. She looked as calm and pleasant as she might if she were just telling me about a neighbor who bought a lovely new hat or who maybe saw a blimp once. She continued.

“The police come and ask questions, ask if anyone hear anything. I tell them I hear nothing, and I ask what happened. They tell me they never see nothing so bad in their whole career. The raccoon, they eat her. They eat her for a long time. The police say ‘She everywhere.’”

This was a lot to have suddenly sprung on me.

“And so for long time no one want to live there, because that lady die there and that lady everywhere there. But then eventually, someone buy it. Two guys. No wifes. You know.”

I nod that yes, I do in fact know.

“And they move in and now it look beautiful. They make it such a nice house. But you know what?”

For this last part, she lowered her voice to a stage whisper.

“She still everywhere.”

And that, I suppose, is true, in both the metaphysical and literal senses.

Every night, when I see the English bulldog-sized mother raccoon skitter down the fence line with her two raccoonitos, I remember this story and remind myself that there’s a good chance all three of these have tasted people-flesh. I wonder how much of a difference they see between me and the unfortunate neighbor lady, who I did not get a chance to meet. And then I decide not to sleep with just the screen door protecting me from the rest of the world.

She everywhere.

Creepy stories, previously:

• The Woman in White
• “Beware the Ragman if You Stay Up Late!”
• The Unusual Incident on the Fourteenth Floor
• The Day Storke Tower Broke
• My Name Is Drew and I Was a Childhood Logophobe