After tearing down two factory plants and an 18th-century stone cottage, the developers stopped. Maybe they ran into trouble with their permits. I don’t know—I was twelve.
Where the smaller plant once stood, they forgot a heap of dirt about sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and fifteen feet tall. Onion grass and dandelions soon burst up from the ground, followed by a purple-berried tangle of pokeweed. As the poke and grasses grew together taller than my dad, songbirds took up residence—white-throated sparrows and house finches, house and Carolina wrens, catbirds, grackles, some starlings that used to nest in the human-abandoned plant buildings. Passing by on daily walks to and from middle school, I saw the plants erupt into being that spring; in the fall, I watched a crow crunch-snap a construction worker’s lost bag of chips at the mound’s base.
The second spring resurrected the grass and poke, along with some tiny black walnut and tree of heaven saplings. I liked to walk a ring around the dirt mound after school, following chips and call notes, rarely spotting anything but cardinals through the walls of dead and living vegetation. September afternoons, I stood under the old walnut tree at the property’s edge, flinging walnuts over the dirt mound until my shoulder throbbed. Sometimes, a groundhog saw me coming and wobble-sprinted into the pokeweed jungle.
It was never my place. But it became one of my places.
The third spring, short new wineberry bushes fuzzed the edge of the weed line. I checked on them in late June, but the plants were still too small to bear fruit. By then, the young walnuts and trees of heaven hurled fronds wherever they could find gaps through the poke, making the dirt mound look downright tropical.
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At the end of August, heading to my first day of eighth grade, I walked past the dirt mound’s place and found an apartment building there. Where the groundhog used to hide, chic glass sliding doors stacked into the sky. Workers bustled in and out, installing faux-wood laminate. Soon the place would fill with nurses and accountants and young doctors trying to pay off their loans.
If I felt sad, I’ve forgotten the feeling. No one ever said the groundhog and the starlings and the walnut trees and I could keep our pile of dirt.