Shade in Los Angeles

Two women came to the door on a Saturday morning in June. One had a clipboard and the other had a folder with printed material in it. They said they were with an organization that planted trees.

They said the block had eleven percent canopy coverage and the city average was twenty-one. They said trees lowered surface temperatures. They said a tree on the south side of a house could bring the inside temperature down by several degrees and cut a cooling bill by fifteen percent. The one with the folder turned it around so he could see the chart.

“It does require some work, though,” she said. “We want to be upfront about that. Trees need water. Especially the first three years.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have a hose?”

“I have a hose.”

“If you don’t, we can provide a bucket.”

“I have a hose,” he said. “Sure. Let’s do the tree.”

The two women looked at each other. “That’s wonderful,” the one with the clipboard said. She wrote his address down. “We’ve had a hard time on this block, honestly. We couldn’t understand why your neighbors said no.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Two weeks later there was a ring at the door early. There were three women on the walk. They were wearing the same green shirt. Two of them were holding shovels. There was a tree in a burlap ball lying in the back of one of the cars at the curb with the hatch open. It was about five feet tall.

He came out onto the porch in a t-shirt with a cup of coffee. Two of them were already walking the yard and pointing at it.

“You want a hand, ladies?”

“Oh, thank you. We’re good, though. We’ve planted five trees this month already.”

“The ground’s pretty hard here.”

“Don’t worry. We’re prepared.”

“Okay,” he said. He sat down on the step. “Long week.”

“Well, you relax. This is our job today.”

They marked a spot in the middle of the yard with orange spray paint. The front yard was grass and a walk. Both of the shovels had flat blades. Two of them cut the sod off in squares and stacked it to the side, and one laid out a tarp for the dirt. They worked in pairs and traded off every few minutes.

The hole was about four inches deep. One of the women got in her car and said she was going to the hardware store. She came back with a pickaxe and after that the digging went faster.

A man pulled up in another car and got a folding chair out of the trunk and leaned it against the fence.

“Sorry I’m late.”

He put on a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of gloves that still had the tag on them, and he put sunscreen on his face and his neck and the backs of his hands before he picked up a shovel.

The boy came out and stood at the end of the porch and watched them.

“What are they doing?”

“They’re planting a tree.”

The boy watched for another minute and went back inside.

They stopped and drank water and one of them took a picture of the hole.

The dogs came out. Both dogs went over to them and they stopped digging. One of the dogs lay down on the pile of dirt next to the hole and stayed there.

“My dog looks just like this one,” one of them said. “Exactly like this. It’s unbelievable.”

“What kind is she?”

“I don’t know, actually. I adopted her.” She scratched the dog behind the ear with both hands. “What’s this one’s name?”

“Peaches.”

“That’s a great name,” she said.

He went out back. There was a lemon tree by the steps and two avocados and an orange along the fence and a fig against the garage. He picked two avocados and took them inside. There was a pot of chicken and rice on the stove from the night before.

He came out on the porch. “There’s plenty of food if anybody wants to eat. Chicken and rice.”

“Oh my God, that is so generous. Thank you so much. We actually packed sandwiches.”

The man in the hat looked up from the hole. “And I don’t eat meat, but thank you.”

“Okay,” he said.

They got a cooler out of one of the cars and ate standing up in the yard next to the hole. The man in the hat unfolded his chair and sat in it and put on more sunscreen. They were done in about ten minutes and back at it.

He ate inside at the table with the boy. The radio was on in the kitchen.

The hole was eight inches deep in the middle and about four at the edges. Two of them were taking turns and one was down on her knees pulling the loose dirt out by hand.

He came out with a glove and a ball and he and the boy went out into the street and threw for a while. A car came down the block and they moved onto the grass and waited and then went back out.

“Are you working tomorrow?”

“Half day.”

The boy threw a few more and then went across the street to another house, and he went back to the porch.

One of the women came up the walk.

“Would it be okay if we used your hose? Just to soften the ground up a little.”

“Sure. It’s on the side of the house, by the meter.”

She went around the corner and stopped. “Oh, I see it.”

He stayed where he was.

The sprinklers came on. The heads came up across the front yard and they moved back onto the walk and one of them held her clipboard over her head. He came off the porch and went around the side of the house and shut the valve, and the heads went down. “Sorry about that. It’s on a timer.”

“No, that’s on us. We should have asked.”

He backed the car down the driveway and left it at the curb and got a bucket. The truck was parked in front of it, with the tailgate down and the mower ramped up into the bed and the handle sticking out past the bumper with a bungee cord over it. There was a name and a phone number painted on the door. He took the sponge and the wash mitt out of a milk crate in the bed and set them on the tailgate. He moved a six-foot steel bar that was leaning against the wooden side rail so he could get to the chamois, and he stood the bar back up against the rail.

The hose was out in the front yard with them, so he filled the bucket at the kitchen sink and carried it out.

The car was mostly clean. He did the roof and the hood and the glass, then the panels, then rinsed it and dried it with the chamois, then did the wheels and the tires last with a separate brush.

His phone rang while he was doing the wheels. He wiped his hands on his shorts and took it standing by the tailgate.

“Yeah. Yeah, I can take the dead wood out of it.” He listened. “How tall is it?” He listened. “Okay. Anything over about thirty I’ve got to bring the lift, so it’s not going to be like the trimming.” He listened. “Tuesday. Early, before it gets hot.”

He put the phone in his pocket and finished the tires. He swept the water off the driveway with a push broom and coiled the chamois and put everything back in the milk crate.

They talked about the burlap. Two of them thought it came off and two of them thought it stayed on and broke down in the soil. The man in the hat looked it up on his phone and read part of it out loud and then scrolled and read another part. They decided to cut the twine and take the top third off once the ball was in the hole and leave the rest.

He took a screwdriver and a socket set out to the side gate, which had been dragging. He took the top hinge off, packed the screw holes, and set it back a quarter inch higher. He hung the gate and swung it twice and it cleared.

The mower ran in the backyard for about fifteen minutes and then stopped.

The shade of the house had come out across the walk. He brought out a pitcher and a stack of glasses and set them on the porch steps. There were slices of lemon in the pitcher.

“There’s water if you want it.”

He went back inside. After a minute two of them came up to the porch and then the rest came, and they stood on the walk drinking it. The man in the hat put his glass down on the step and put sunscreen on his face and his neck again and picked the glass back up.

“The lemon is such a nice touch.”

“Thanks,” he said.

They went back to the hole. One of them ran a tape down into it and one of them held the tape against the side of the burlap ball, and they called the numbers to each other and dug out another two inches. They cut the sides square and scraped the bottom flat.

They took the tree out of the back of the car. It took three of them to walk it across the yard and they set it down twice. They got it to the hole and lowered it in. The top of the ball sat level with the grass. One of them laid a shovel handle across the hole to check it and it was level, and they said that was good.

They cut the twine and pulled the top third of the burlap off and folded it down. One of them held the trunk and the others pushed the dirt back in and packed it down with their hands and then with the backs of the shovels. Two of them went out to the sidewalk to look at it from there and called back that it was leaning toward the house. They pulled it upright and packed more dirt on the near side. They went back out to the sidewalk. They said it was good now.

They filled the hole to the base of the trunk and built a ring of soil around the edge and ran the hose into it and let it fill up twice.

They took pictures. They took one of all four of them standing behind the tree. They took one of the woman who had come to the door standing next to it with her hand on the trunk. One of them had been recording on her phone on and off since the morning and she walked around the tree with it.

He came out and they took a picture of him next to the tree. They asked if he wanted them to send him a copy and he said sure.

“You’re going to love it in five years,” one of them said. “I’m not kidding. It changes everything about a house.”

“Thank you,” he said.

They loaded the shovels and the pickaxe and the cooler and the empty pitcher into the cars. The man in the hat folded up his chair and put it in his trunk. The one with the clipboard shook his hand and gave him a printed sheet about watering, with a schedule on it for the first three years. They pulled out. It was getting dark.

He brought the glasses in and turned the water back on.

Two days later he went out to the tree with a trowel and scraped the soil off the top of the ball until he found the flare. It was about four inches down.

He put his head in the front door. “I’ve got to leave for work in twenty.”

He dug the tree up, put soil back into the bottom of the hole, and set it back in so the flare sat at the grass. He pulled the rest of the burlap out from underneath, backfilled it, tamped it with his foot, and watered it. There was a pile of bark at the side of the house left over from a job and he took a wheelbarrow of it around and spread it in a ring, keeping it back off the trunk.

He put the wheelbarrow away and came back around the front. The dog was lying in the shade of the tree.

“Peaches,” he said. “Trees give you shade. Those nice people came and planted it for you.”