true dirt

The house next door is for sale. The substantial post and sign, planted a day ago proclaims to all that new territory is up for grabs to the highest bidder.
Preparation for this event has taken over a year: the emptying of people, furniture, and garage junk. The sanding of the floors. The cosmetic repair of paint and the removal of window bars. The neighbors have now relinquished their former estate to the Agent. And last night the Stagers arrived.
I knew this because the lights blazed out from the curtainless windows at about 9pm and I could see two figures conducting a slow dance with a tablecloth. Potted palms suddenly appeared in the empty corners of the living room. Artistic lamps, large cushions, elaborately framed flower prints, and bronze candlesticks transformed what had been a modest house crammed with extended family, TV sets, and Barcaloungers behind a full set of window bars.
The Staging of the House has become an essential part of the house selling ritual in these parts, where the purchase of a thousand square feet of floor space requires the coughing up of half a million dollars. And this particular house was going to need all the staging it could get to distract potential owners from it’s more peculiar aspects. Like the all-cement backyard.
I wondered how they were going to stage that. I know the space well since it is what I see from my bedroom window. From driveway to fence the yard is solid cement. The complicated infrastructure of a wooden stairway leading down from the kitchen is a major visual element. Then there is the metal shed, a quaint perfectly-scaled play house complete with window and window box (a Marie Antoinette theme could be lurking here), and in the very center a 6-foot by 6-foot brick-and-cement platform underneath a vine-covered trellis. The effect is something like those freeway rest stop picnic areas. It was hard to imagine what the Stagers would do with this, though some expensive garden furniture could provide momentary distraction from the reality.
Leaving for work this morning I noticed there were flyers in the plastic box for that purpose attached to the For Sale sign. I plucked one out and read down the list of fabulous attributes of my neighbor’s house. At the bottom of the list was what I was looking for. And it wasn’t “Utility yard great for car repair,” or “Wonderful yard for children with knee pads”
“Patio nestled beneath grapevine” it said on the flyer.