A couple weeks after we signed the pool contract, I came
home to find a young guy lurking on my front lawn, tagging the grass with a can
of spray paint. He tells me the pool company sent him to mark utility lines. Or
maybe he was really a well-dressed, polite gang member whose gang symbols were
short, multi-colored lines. Either way, there was celebration at the Sullivan
house that night because of the spray paint all over our yard. Hopefully it
meant a pool was imminent. Or maybe we were about to be in the middle of a gang
war. Either way, out yard would soon be trashed.
A week later, there was still no pool, but miraculously the
lines on the lawn had multiplied. More lines, more colors, going in more random
directions. How many utilities could really be running from our house to the
street? Cable, electric, water, sewer in blue, green, yellow, and red. But what's
the story with all these other strange colors and shapes? What do purple circles
represent? And was that an aquamarine rectangle?
In addition to the vagaries of utility lines, the other
problem that was bugging me was a large bush in the middle of the spot
where the pool was going to be built. This thing was at least eight feet tall
and six across, so it was too huge for me to just transplant it with my little
garden trowel. It might have been a magnolia or some other such Southern
flowering shrub. It's impossible to keep the different types straight. Anyway,
it was pretty and it had white flowers and it smelled good and it was healthy
and hadn't done anything to me, so I wanted it protected.
I contacted a landscaper to come move it, but he never called
me back. Plus, we were already spending a pantload of money on the pool, so
spending more to move foliage felt extravagant. So every time I looked out in
the yard, seeing that pretty, doomed bush made me sad. What would the pool guys
do with it on digging day? Surely they wouldn't just run it over with the
excavator, right? So, could they move it? I vowed to pester the construction
team about it the moment they showed up at my house to install the pool. And I
can do a lot of pestering.
