11. Sexton Road Television
I wasn’t entirely sure why.
There is something mildly disconcerting about meeting a friendly stranger at your back fence and watching her make a written record of your family, but Adrianne was lovely and seemed genuinely pleased that someone new had moved into the house. Before leaving, she gave us the name of the trash company and several local recommendations. Useful information, all of it. She closed her notebook and continued up the road.
It was becoming clear that our arrival had not gone unnoticed. This was understandable. In the short time we had lived there, we had hired a tree trimmer and people to clear the property. Jesús and Jaime were tearing apart the ADU. Other people had come to bid on plumbing, electrical work, pest control, the well, septic, electrical, internet, insulation and various things we had only recently learned were problems. Trucks came and went. Trees disappeared. Walls came apart. Piles appeared.
It did not take long for us to become the number one program on Sexton Road television.
The show aired continuously because we were continuously working on the house. There were no commercials and no subscription fee. Anyone driving, walking, cycling, or passing slowly in a pickup truck was welcome to tune in. The programming changed daily. Sometimes there were piles of brush. Sometimes broken appliances. Sometimes strangers carried lumber across the yard. Other episodes consisted largely of one member of the family standing motionless in the middle of the property, staring at something that had recently failed.
People slowed down. Heads turned.
One afternoon, a boy came past on a motorcycle riding a wheelie, front tire in the air, engine echoing down the road. He disappeared down the road. A moment later, a car I would come to recognize made one of its first appearances, accelerating down the short straightaway as fast as it possibly could before the rise at the end of the road. He must have been doing eighty. Even at that speed, I saw his eyes flick toward the house.
Sexton Road television apparently had programming in both directions.
Then Marcia, our neighbor across the street, came over carrying a small bag of tomatoes and zucchini from her garden. This was exactly the sort of thing we had imagined rural neighbors doing before we moved here. She was kind and welcoming and stood with us for a few minutes looking over the property. We thanked her and carried the vegetables inside. It felt very sweet. Very neighborly. Very much like we had landed somewhere people still brought one another tomatoes.
There was also a very small white pickup truck that passed the house slowly from time to time. The driver would look toward the gate, then the garage, then the yard, taking in whatever evidence of upheaval happened to be visible that day. Perhaps he lived nearby. Perhaps he simply drove with exceptional care. I didn’t know.
What I did know was that Sexton Road noticed things.
Soon I began seeing the property through the eyes of whoever happened to be passing. Someone would drive by and wave, and I would notice their gaze move from me toward some part of the yard before they disappeared down the road. Then I would walk out to the street and look back at the house myself.
Ah.
A tree we had taken down and left lying where it fell, slowly turning brown in the sun. A ladder that had been needed for perhaps eleven minutes and had now spent three days leaning precariously against a rosebush. Lumber. Appliances. Boxes. Cardboard blown into the yard.
We were producing an enormous amount of content.
As we established a rhythm on the property, the audience seemed to establish one too. Cars slowed. Occasionally someone pointed. One afternoon, as I was leaving, I saw a man walking a dog stop alongside our fence and crouch with his phone. It looked as though he was photographing the dog. I became convinced he was photographing the ADU. This was not an entirely rational conclusion, but by then I had become unusually sensitive to the possibility that our neighbors were documenting our progress. I called Erin and told her what I had seen. She went up the little dirt road beside the house, caught up with him, and asked to see the photograph.
It was a picture of his dog.
This should have reassured me. Instead, it mostly established that I might be becoming paranoid.
The larger problem was that the property really wasn’t private.
One night, after dark, we had music playing in the house and the string lights glowing over the patio. I wandered to the far corner of the property and looked back. From there, I could see almost everything. The bushes I had assumed screened the patio did essentially nothing. Because of the angle of the property and the little road climbing beside it, the house seemed almost presented to anyone above us. Against the darkness, the windows glowed. The patio was completely visible. I could see into the kitchen and living room.
I walked out to the main road and looked again. Worse. In daylight, the trees and shrubs created an illusion of enclosure. At night, the landscape disappeared and the house became a lighted box at the bottom of the hill. I could see through the front windows. I could see through the back windows. I could see Erin sitting inside working. We had moved onto an acre in rural Sonoma County and somehow achieved the privacy of a fish tank.
The following morning, I was talking with a neighbor who walked past the house. We talked about the move, the property, the work we were doing. Then, almost incidentally, he mentioned that his daughter had become upset with them because of Grey.
Grey?
Apparently, every time they passed our house, she could see Grey inside playing Fortnite. She was not allowed to play Fortnite. “Why does he get to play Fortnite and I don’t?” she kept demanding.
I looked back at the house.
Um.
This meant they weren’t merely seeing the house. They could see what was happening on the television inside the house.
We had worried before the move that living in rural California might leave us isolated. Isolation was no longer my primary concern.
And visibility, it turned out, was only half of the problem. We lived near the bottom of a hill. Sound traveled upward with remarkable efficiency. We already knew this because the three enormous white dogs across the road could bark at the mailboxes and make it sound as though the confrontation were occurring in our bedroom. Gradually, I understood that the same acoustics worked in reverse. If we could hear them, they could hear us.
Our music. The doodles barking at each other. The kids fighting. Grey crying about homework. The construction. The saws. The hammering. And presumably every time I hit my finger with a hammer and announced the event across several acres.
There was something almost comforting about it once I accepted it. We had imagined rural life as privacy: an acre of our own, surrounded by trees, separated from other people. But this wasn’t isolation. It was a neighborhood with larger yards.
People brought tomatoes. They stopped at fences. They knew which family had moved into which house. They knew the children and the dogs. They noticed when a tree came down, when a building was being rebuilt, and, apparently, which video games your twelve-year-old was playing through the living-room window.
We had been worried no one would know us.
Within a few weeks, people we had never met knew Grey was allowed to play Fortnite.
Sexton Road television was a hit.
