The Woman In My Backyard

I have a patio area in my backyard. I call it the party patio. It has a fire pit, Adirondack chairs, a picnic table, and I recently added flowers and an umbrella with LED lights. It’s pretty awesome. But I rarely use it. The only guest I have ever entertained on the party patio is my dad, who will sit by the fire and smoke a cigar. But today, when I went out back to throw a bag of cat poop into the garbage, there was a woman in my backyard.

She was sitting at the picnic table, decked out in St Patrick’s Day green and beads, drinking something from a stainless steel mug. She got up and introduced herself when she saw me come out of my screened-in porch (the non-party patio.) She came with a girlfriend from North Carolina for the Savannah St. Patrick's Day festivities. She’s an ocean girl, not a mountain girl, and she loves SCUBA diving and her 16-foot boat. She gets a lot of carpenter bees at her house, but she wishes she had more bumblebees. (She told me this as she stood watching a bumblebee gather pollen from my party patio peach tree.)

She explained that she was walking through the neighborhood and thought that the person who had my backyard must be really cool. That my

🚨I INTERRUPT THIS POST WITH AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE 🚨

I am typing this on the party patio and the woman just came back. She asked me if I was married, told me her husband recently died of cancer, and then she invited me back to the house where she’s staying for dinner. I declined, as I already had leftover frozen pizza for dinner. She said she might be back, then she picked up her can of Michelob Ultra and left. I thought this story would have an ending (woman left and I never heard from her again), but apparently not yet. I should have gone to Asheville this weekend.