The Inukshuk in my backyard

Thursday evening I decided to quickly turn on the sprinkler in our backyard before I left for aquafitness class. As I stepped out onto the deck, I saw that a few handfuls of gravel and blades of grass had been heaped at the head of the stairs. James pointed out the rivulets made by fingers in the patch of gravel at the bottom, where cement blocks will eventually rest. I was not too thrilled that someone had made a mess that I had to clean up: I was anxious to be out the door and on the road, but being the responsible adult that I struggle to be, and the fastidious individual that I am, I got the broom and dustpan.

Our townhouse and deck from the farthest edge of our backyard
(the two white posts, far right, will eventually support a fence:
"good fences make good neighbors")

As I swept away the traces, I wondered if this was the reason for Darth’s earlier fit of meyowling (a conflation of meowing/yowling/howling—if you don’t think this is possible, you haven’t heard Darth). He likes to keep his eyes trained on the great outdoors just beyond the patio window, and he’s sensitive to disruptions in routine. For instance, last week, a few minutes after one of his fits, I detected eau de skunk wafting in the window. So perhaps he had once again been warning us that something or someone was invading our space.

My first hunch was that the youngsters from the townhouses with backyards facing ours had tired of tag and tea parties and decided to leave us a token of, what, their esteem? their loathing? their creative abilities? There are no small children at our house whom they would want to attract or repel. Maybe it was an offering for the household gods, i.e., the cats? I decided to attribute it to their blatant disregard of other people’s property.

Until, that is, I began to entertain suspicions involving our neighbors to the north. Let me explain: Tuesday evening I went out to cut the grass at approx. 8:00pm. Out of the corner of my eye, I became aware of the neighbor lady pressed against her patio window; I felt rather than saw her glaring at my industriousness. Mere seconds later I heard the patio door slam shut with a vengeance. Guess even though it’s got no motor, my mower still makes a bit of a racket when I run it. (Oops.) Was there a by-law, unbeknownst to me, restricting the operation of lawn mowers to the hours between 7:00am and 7:00pm? Could this little pile of pluckings be some strange voodoo concocted to keep me in my place? Nasty, nasty business.

At the head of the stairs where "it" once stood

Not until Friday morning, while waiting for the kettle to boil, did it strike me that in my overprotectiveness about my deck, my lawn, my space, I had misinterpreted the gesture of the grass and gravel. I am convinced it must have been the children after all. It wasn’t about me: it was about them. It was an inukshuk of sorts, a cairn, a marker, a means of insisting upon and attesting to their existence in a particular time and space. It was an object validating that they had passed by and indulged their innate desire to create something of meaning, no matter how fleeting and temporal, despite the possibility that their contractual meaning might be lost in the interpretation.

This flash of insight made me deeply regret my hasty actions of the previous night. I contemplated reconstructing the inukshuk—but by then the breeze had done its damage. Anyway, I reasoned, a replica would not exude the aura of the original. I lament the fact that I did not accept it, did not value it for its own sake and take a picture of it before I destroyed it forever. All that’s left now are a few scattered fragments, barely discernible, at the foot of the stairs.

The remains of that day