Perplexing theft of landscape items – even an old bucket
By: Cora Leland 07/01/2007
I live on 42nd Avenue North and both my front and back yards are visible from the street. They are full of flowers and yard stuff; bird baths, bird feeders, statues and lots of pots of flowers. Pots of flowers line my driveway, hang in the yard and decorate my front steps. This year I planted some pots with seeds and, even though the rain finally came, they need to be watered a couple of times a day on nice sunny days.
When I got home after work on May 31, I set about watering the seedlings along my driveway and refilled the bird bath in my back yard. From there I went to water a pot on the other side of my back yard. In the back of my yard, still visible from 42nd, I found myself staring at a mound of dirt where the pot had been. It took a few seconds for the scene to register. Someone had come to the far back of my yard, in full view of God and everybody on 42nd, and had dumped out the flowers and dirt and had stolen the planter!
Now this planter was no prize. It was an old metal bucket. It looked okay from the street side because I positioned the dented, paint spattered side with a hole in it toward the lilac bushes that separate my yard from my neighbor’s yard. I had considered throwing it away this spring but it was free (came with the house) and looked okay way in the back with flowers in it, so I kept it.
I promptly called one of my neighbors to come and see. She has lived in her house since the 1950s. In a few minutes, we were both staring at the pile of dirt and remarking how strange it all was and how the neighborhood had changed. That someone had actually come all the way to the back of my yard, dumped out this old planter and taken it with them was really outrageous!
Other landscape items disappeared from our neighborhood last summer. A neighbor lost a bench seat from her front yard, a fire pit was stolen, and I lost a pot of geraniums, two solar yard lights, a few small American flags taken last 4th of July, and four bales of straw on Halloween. But this old metal bucket?
Standing there, staring at the dirt pile, my 80+ year old neighbor remarked, “Maybe they thought it was an antique.” “That old pot?” was my reply. Then I thought of the antique dealer on the Red Green Show who sold junk to the tourists for huge sums of money and it hit me. We have thieves here in Camden who are as stupid as the characters on the Red Green Show!
Cora Leland
Victory