My neighbor let her dog use my lawn as a toilet every morning for six months and never cleaned up once — Kertati I stayed polite until she made one comment I couldn’t forget, and by the next morning I’d taught her a lesson without raising my voice once.

One afternoon in June, Marguerite stopped near the sidewalk.

She stared at the hydrangeas.

“What do you do to them?” she asked.

I looked at her.

Eight months had passed since the incident.

She had been walking Winston around the block ever since.

No problems.

No mess.

No arguments.

Exactly what I had wanted.

“Drainage,” I said.

Then I paused.

“And patience.”

Another pause.

“And knowing when to stop waiting for things to fix themselves.”

She looked at me.

I looked back.

We both knew we weren’t only talking about flowers.

“I’ll try that,” she said.

“It works.”

Then she went home.

I returned to the flower bed.

Oliver eventually came outside and crouched beside me.

“Can Winston ever come into our yard again?”

I thought about it.

“Yes.”

“As long as Marguerite cleans up after him.”

“Will she?”

“I think so.”

“How do you know?”

I looked across the lawn.

At the hydrangeas.

At the flower beds I had spent years getting right.

At the yard I had built slowly and carefully.

“Because now she knows I notice.”

Oliver considered that.

“Good.”

Then he ran off.

I stayed there with my hands in the soil.

Gardening teaches you strange things.