"On Golden Pond"
Arkansas Times
August 24, 2001

I used to discourage my mother, a gardener, from giving me the cuttings, rootings, starts, and inevitable thirds of annual six-packs she would bring to my house in Bella Vista, telling her in so many words that I had better things to do than "stand around the yard with a water hose in my hand."

I had lots of good arguments about not trying to control nature, about appreciating the flora and fauna in all its wild glory, and I even hinted at my suspicions about the dark underbelly of the gardener psyche, asking, "Who is to say what makes a flower and what makes a weed?" "Is the dandelion not, in its own way, very beautiful?" "Why shouldn't the humble acorn seedling be allowed to flourish?"

Mom mumbled something about a college education being a mixed blessing, and, persistent as Kudzu, she began planting hostas and ferns in my yard instead of just leaving them to whither in my carport before I got around to planting them.

I tossed some water on those plants, and they grew that whole summer long. Fall came, and I breathed a sigh of relief that my brush with gardening was over.

But I was only suffering from temporary sanity, which ended the next March. Having grown accustomed during my hosta and fern period to noticing the subtle changes of the ground, I saw a circle of buttercups as they were coming up, so intrepid and strong they supported for a day on top of their blades the clumps of dirt they'd pushed away to break through to the sun.

In a flurry of grand notions regarding nature's immutability, I was hooked, and I saw the truth. Dandelions are evil, and acorn seedlings are my sworn enemy. There are good plants and there are bad plants, and they know who they are.

*****

I now own a pick ax that looks like it came off a chain gang. This was another so-called gift from my mother, arriving at my house one day with a big, pink ribbon tied around the handle. My collection of essential equipment also includes an electric chainsaw and 200 feet of extension cord. I am on a continual quest for rubber shoes, and every summer holds at least one trip to the doctor for a prescription for steroids to counteract a poison ivy rash, as much a harbinger of spring as blooming azaleas.

I bought 15 tons of dirt, which arrived in a dump truck and was poured out in a huge pile in the middle of my front yard. In case you don't have a concept of how much dirt 15 tons is, it translates to roughly a million wheelbarrows full.

My yard, a shady, dramatically sloped acre full of rocks, is in Bella Vista Village (Zone 6), a retirement community. I live here, though I am single and in my thirties, because I work here, and because I like it.

Bella Vista is a "master-planned community," a place dreamed up by a company, a rather cultivated form of town with its own logo: an oak leaf.

Bella Vista Village got started in 1965, when John Cooper Sr. began marketing the roughly 36,000-acre community to middle-aged Midwesterners, selling the idea of buying a vacation home, making payments over the years, and eventually retiring here. The low cost of living, low crime rate, scenic beauty, mild climate, and newly built golf courses and lakes were the draw to hardworking supervisors and managers who had a little something put back, and they moved here in droves.

The company blanketed certain areas with direct mail, and there are stories of Bella Vista residents, anxious to make friends in their new community, meeting people from their old neighborhood whom they never knew in Iowa, Nebraska, or Illinois.

These days, there are ubiquitous reminders that almost everyone here is from somewhere else. Drive around Bella Vista in the fall, and you don't see Razorback pennants hanging from the houses; you see cornhuskers. Many residents have their old license plates attached to their mailbox poles, and it's not uncommon for couples to nail wooden signs to their houses with their first names prominently displayed for everyone to see: Henry and Jane from Minnesota live in number four. It's a world of twos and couples here, until somebody is widowed.

Lancaster, Penn.; Carroll, Iowa; Milwaukee, Wis.; Kansas City, Kan.; Bushnell, S.D.; Algansee, Mich.; Oshkosh, Wis. Those are the birthplaces listed in a recent Weekly Vista obituary section. No one was born in Bella Vista, almost no one who lives in Bella Vista was born in Arkansas, and very few people who live here are even Southerners. The Arkansans who do live in Bella Vista are probably the only natives who can distinguish a Minnesota accent from a Wisconsin one.

*****

Bella Vista wasn't Cooper's first community. He began his land development career in Cherokee Village, near Hardy, Arkansas. A man I know lived and worked there when he was not yet 30 years old, sometime during the '70s.

He had a favorite Cherokee Village bar, a favorite barstool, even. One night while he was especially festive and heartily enjoying the punch line of his own joke, he laughed with such gusto he fell off his stool. Lying on the barroom floor, he saw a sobering sea of white shoes and plaid pants.

A man under 30 does not come away from that event unscathed, and he has since become quite respectable.

*****

According to the 2000 census, the population of Bella Vista is 16,582. There are eight golf courses and eight lakes. The golf department estimates there are 340,000 rounds played here every year.

Since 1965 Cooper has developed five other villages in Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Missouri and West Virginia, and the company has been under the regimes of John Cooper Sr., John Cooper Jr., and, increasingly these days, John III. The company is no longer aggressively marketing land sales, although the home building division is still very active here.

Bella Vista is, in the marketing parlance, a "mature" product. There are still plenty of retirees here who look like they just stepped off the set of a Centrum vitamin commercial Ö that tan, fit kind of senior with a gleam in his eyes who hasn't moved up to the front tees. But the "old old" are here in force, and there are signs.

New townhomes touting no exterior maintenance, no yardwork, and handicap access features are very popular these days. Bella Vista's only senior care facility, Concordia, has a waiting period that ranges from 18 months to two years. Plans for a new, $20 million senior campus, called Highlands Crossing, were announced in May. The new development will provide apartments, small homes, and assisted living options for seniors who want to "age in place," which is, according to groups like AARP, exactly what older folks want to do.
In the spring, Bella Vista is an estate sale paradise. Entire households are on display, and, rifling through all the contents, you can tell who was a reader, a traveler, religious.

Often, the houses seem to have held only a woman, the man having passed on long before. The closets are filled with ladies dresses and pantsuits, the bathroom with only feminine things. Asian-influenced decorating seems to be popular in these houses, oddly joined with a preference for pink.

There is a woman who runs all the sales, putting one together every weekend during the busy season. She has an e-mail list of people who receive information on where she's going to be every weekend, like a popular band. She's who you call when it's time to downsize, or sell everything.

She wears huge owl-like glasses and calls everyone honey. Her hair is in a modified beehive, and her diamond-ringed hands always have long, red fingernails.

When I go to these sales, I always get the feeling that when she's talking to her co-workers, it's for the customers' benefit.

"Well, we've been in business for 13 years!" she'll say, and it sounds like dialogue from a play. I overheard her, while I was picking through a stack of books, talking about a recent trip to Europe. Business is good.

There is a peculiar fascination here for these events. At one sale last year, so many people crammed onto a deck that it collapsed under the weight. It made the paper.

*****

I live just off Cooper Road in one of the earliest-developed areas of the Village. The names of the streets are those of the original Cooper management team: Basore, Sheneman, Gore, Orr, Billingsley, Spencer.

Among my closest neighbors, Walter and Elizabeth have been here the longest. Walter has the very distinctive hip replacement walk you learn to recognize in the village, an odd jerking mobility that involves the shoulders as much as the legs.

When I go running, Walter always yells at me, "I wish I could do that!" When I'm working in the yard he shouts, "I wish I could help!"

He mows his yard on a riding lawnmower, taking care of the side of the street that ends up at my house. If I'm in the yard, we scream small talk over the sound of the mower for a little while, and then he heads back home.

Walter loves animals, and he keeps tabs on a crow that comes up in my carport every day to eat cat food. He and I also share a fondness for raccoons. He tells me that, when he was a kid, he had a pet coon that rode around on his shoulders.

I've collected my own share of raccoon stories from living in Bella Vista. One of Cooper's policies in each of its communities has been to leave around 25 percent of the land in its original form, and "green belts" run throughout the Village. My back yard descends into a steep ravine with a creek running along the bottom, and, as with many houses here, the woods continue up to my back yard. All manner of wildlife comes out of those woods, including raccoons, foxes, possums, skunks, armadillos, and feral cats.

There is one little animal that I see almost weekly near the Country Club golf course just before Highway 71. He is always in the same place, picking around in the lush Bermuda grass just outside the woods there, looking up from time to time to watch the golf carts or the passing cars.

*****

I moved away for a few years and then came back, driving a U-Haul truck with all my possessions and two cats in it across two states. As I was unloading my stuff with the help of my family, Walter rode over on his lawnmower to say hello.

He turned the engine off and stayed a few minutes. "Did you drive that thing yourself?" he asked, pointing at the truck. When I said yes, he shook his head and laughed.

Liberal, single, female, and under 40, I've been surprised at how appreciative conservative, married, and over-60 men seem to be of self-reliance. Once, while on my roof cleaning out gutters, I said hello to a neighbor down below. He looked around trying to find me for a second, and then he looked up and saw me on the roof. "Girl, you better be careful!" he said, waving me off and laughing and going about his business.

When a former boyfriend quit coming around, Walter felt at liberty to ask me where he was, not letting me say anything after the strength in my voice told him I was fine.

"He just wasn't the one," he summarized, effectively closing the topic he'd initiated and reminding me I didn't owe anyone an explanation. Then he added something about "nice girl" and "rocks in his head."

I find it easy to agree with him, though we probably don't vote alike.

One beautiful Saturday morning I was out working in the yard, and most of the neighborhood folks were in their yards, too. The ones with good sense were sitting on their porches sipping coffee, and the rest of us were working, but it seemed like no one was deranged enough to be inside on that beautiful May morning. Other than singing birds and an occasional greeting across yards, it was quiet. Then, from out of nowhere, Walter came racing down the street on a brand new electric wheelchair. It was cherry red, and everyone cheered "hey Walter, look at you!" as if he'd just learned to ride a bicycle.

*****

Bud and Sophie live across the street from me on the top of the slope that continues down my yard.

When Bud's name is mentioned in the neighborhood, it's always said with the phrase, "you know he's on one lung." He had cancer a long, long time ago. Sophie had cancer a long, long time ago, too, but they're both OK now.

The career Bud is retired from is construction, and he has an entire woodworking shop set up in his garage. His yard is full of wooden turtles, frogs, bears and tulips. There's a flagpole in the middle of the yard with a U.S. flag flying at all times. Like many people here, Bud and his wife Sophie have opted to have a gravel yard, foregoing mowing grass forever.

I use a wood burning stove to heat my house, turning on the central heat and air only under the most bitter circumstances. In the winter, Bud keeps me supplied with his scrap wood to use for kindling, and my fires are begun with rejected toy train cars and ill-fated frog heads grinning insanely as they go up in flames.

Sometimes, when Bud is really involved in a project, he gets started with his table saw at 7 a.m. sharp. If it's a nice day, he leaves open the garage door, which directly faces my bedroom. I awaken many spring mornings to the romantic sight of my sheer white curtains stirring in the slightly cool breeze, my open window flooded with morning sunlight. I have planted a lilac bush in front of that window, with hopes that someday my mornings will be perfumed for two precious weeks a year. No doubt, if that happens, those springtime sights and smells will be joined with the screeching mechanical sounds of the wooden tulip factory.

*****

Sophie told me that the first words Bud ever said to her were, "hey, toots." Her first words to him were "go to hell." They will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary this year.

Sophie works a job, and usually drives, leaving Bud behind during the day and on the passenger's side in the evening. This is a common Bella Vista sight: women driving and men riding, women shoveling snow while men look on, women watching over their husbands, protecting them like mothers.

Bud, who I suspect might also be on one ear, keeps the television volume turned up so loud I can sometimes hear it at my house. Their phone rings so loudly (they have an extension in the garage), it makes me jump.

I went over to help Sophie with a computer problem she was having one day, and Bud kept watching television while I was there, mumbling something about how he never touched a computer and never would. Sophie and I screamed at each other over the noise for a while, until she finally yelled, "Dad! DAD! Turn the TV down, please!" She made a friendly, exasperated sound, and we figured out what was going on with her computer.

Because Bud and Sophie's house is full of pictures, I know that she was beautiful. She is still beautiful. She dresses pretty, she learns, and she laughs a lot. One day while I was standing around the yard with a water hose in my hand, I saw Sophie out watering her flowerbeds while Bud looked on from the porch. He said something to her that I didn't hear, and she gave him a quick spray.

Bud rarely ventures past the porch. When he sees me out, he always makes the same joke.

"Those rocks aren't gonna grow no matter how much you water them!" he shouts at the top of his lung.

I look over and wave and laugh.

"You're probably right!" I yell.

"I SAID, those rocks aren't gonna grow no matter how much you water them!" he screams at me again.

*****

Then there were the Randolphs, my neighbors to the south. Word on the street is there was some sort of coup on the part of a daughter who didn't think they could handle their own place any more, and they were moved off to Iowa to be closer to family.

The Randolphs took a special liking to my cats, two old surly pound kitties. Both of the Randolphs' memories were so bad they could never remember my cats' names, so they gave up and just called them Mr. Kitty and Mrs. Kitty.

The Randolphs used to tell me stories about what Mr. and Mrs. Kitty did all day while I was at work. Mr. Kitty was fond of visiting them, because they sat outside a lot and always had time to give him a good scratching. Mrs. Kitty never had much to do with the Randolphs or anyone else. They politely excused her, saying she was busy hunting chipmunks.

I think of the Randolphs every fall when I've grown tired of planting, weeding, and watering and begin to open the windows and dream of my wood burning stove and rest. I think of them as I saw them one day when they didn't know I was watching.

It was October, and Bella Vista was in the midst of the "spectacular autumn foliage of the Ozarks," as the old marketing brochures used to say. It was the kind of beautiful day that made office work feel like slavery, and I'd rushed home to eat lunch and bask for an hour in my private surroundings, grasping at a sense of solace and looking vacantly out the window. As I ate and snatched minutes like a petty thief, they sat, side by side on the steps of their back deck. They looked up into the air, watching an oak leaf shower and paying, in their silent watching together, a lovely, heartbreaking tribute to a waning life.