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September was the worst month.
On the first Monday, a post appeared in the Wren Hollow Neighbors group on Facebook, which had four hundred members and was administered, it will not surprise you, by Karen. It was titled SAFETY REMINDER and it had a little siren emoji at each end.
Neighbors, the Board has received several concerns about an individual photographing homes, vehicles, and residents in the early morning hours, including near bus stops. While we are not naming anyone, please remember that you have the right to privacy on your own property. If you observe anyone photographing you or your children without consent, please document it and report it to the Board and, if appropriate, to Larkin PD. Stay safe!
It didn't name me. It didn't need to. By lunchtime there were ninety comments. Some of them were kind — Is this about the tree lady? She's lovely, she's doing a science thing — and some of them were the kind of thing people say on the internet that they would never say over a fence. Somebody I'd never met wrote that "those types" always seemed like the nice old lady until they weren't. Somebody else posted a blurry photo of me at the triangle with my camera, taken from a car.
On Wednesday, at the bus stop at Larkspur and Thrasher, a woman I didn't know — a young mother in leggings with a toddler on her hip and an older girl clinging to her arm — stepped in front of me on the sidewalk and said, "Don't take pictures of my kids."
I wasn't holding the camera. It was in my jacket pocket. I was walking to the pin oak.
"I would never," I said. "I'm photographing the tree. The oak. For a — "
"I don't care what you're photographing. Stay away from my kids."
The bus came. The girl looked back at me through the window. I stood on the corner with my hands in my pockets and felt sixty-one years old in a way I hadn't since the week after Dale's funeral.
That night I sat at the kitchen table and thought seriously about stopping. Not the case — I couldn't stop the case, Ruth's house was on the line — but the trees. The seven walks. Two and a half years of Tuesdays and Fridays. I thought about how much easier it would be to stay inside and let the pictures stop and have nobody look at me at the bus stop like that ever again.