When I left the garden Friday night at dusk there was nothing amiss.  Even along the muddy river, at the edge of the reeds all was quiet.  When I arrived early Saturday morning to do some watering, I felt like what I imagine parents of teenagers must feel like coming home early from a trip after entrusting the house to their children's care.  The place had been ransacked.

Well, I shouldn't say ransacked.  The partiers actually brought more in than they took out, and once I had thoroughly surveyed the damage I saw that there was surprisingly little to the flora — a few trampled zinnias along the fence where they'd broken in — but otherwise they'd just left a mess.

As my neighbors arrived and surveyed the scene it was like CSI-Fenway.  Everyone went sniffing around for forensic evidence and came up with an elaborate theory.  Mine was that the partiers had entered from two gardens over — from the Needs.  The Special Needs garden is easy to break into, and from there it's pretty easy to break into gardens abutting it. 

It appeared to me that they had jumped the fence to my neighbors, and then jumped the fence into mine.  From there, they surveyed my patio furniture and found it wanting, so they hoisted a wooden bench built for two over my neighbor's fence and set it up on my patio, tossing my chairs aside.  And I have to say, the bench was perfect.  It looked lovely under my poodled-up lilac with a wooden trellis behind it.

They also set up my big rickety wooden box (about the size of an old pine casket) for privacy, dumping the contents in the process.  They managed to bust up some gardening implements in the process, but nothing of any value was destroyed in the fray.  Like I said, it was just a big mess, aside from that lovely little tableau with the bench and the trellis.

Unfortunately, I had to give the bench back.  If it hadn't been from right next door I might have been able to play ignorant.  It was a brilliant bit of feng shui on the part of the partiers, and I resolved to make a trip to the Home Depot for the identical bench at the next opportunity.

The idea of the bench chastened my anger, I have to admit.  I thought to myself, well, they were trying to tell me something.  Maybe it is time I gave up my lesbian lawn chairs (I got them at Goodwill a couple of years ago — one has "Pat" written on the seat-bottom in magic marker, and the other says "Connie") and go Martha Stewart instead.

But any time there's a break-in, it leaves you feeling a little violated.  Sometimes despite yourself.  I mean, you expect it, but when it happens it still leaves you unsettled.  Mainly it's the "energy field" — I think of my garden as a bubble of tranquility.  I know it's not impenetrable, but when it's punctured it deflates, and it takes a while to pump up the atmosphere again.

My slightly hysterical fear when something like this happens is that it will keep happening.  Like my neighbor Rob's garden that was commandeered and occupied by an angry troll for over half the year last year, I don't want my No-Drama Zone to become an All-Drama Zone, a place of swirling anxieties where I'm afraid to go for fear of what I'll find there this time. 

Of course one of the challenges of a community garden in the heart of the city is dealing with just this sort of thing, and most of my fellow gardeners have experienced break-ins, thefts, and vandalism. 

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, as the song goes.  But no one promised me a rose garden, either.