We can’t keep pets here. It’s one of the rules and is strictly enforced. No one cares. I mean no one tries to smuggle a pet in. They don’t feel the lease violates their rights. Several years ago there was a tenant with a Great Dane who went off one morning and shot up his nursing class at the university because he’d received a bad assessment, killing his instructor and two fellow students before killing himself. There was not one mention of what happened to the dog afterwards, not a single mention. Information about the dog is unavailable to this day. I sometimes think of this guy who wanted to be certified as a nurse, and not only what was he thinking when he set off that morning to murder those people but what was he thinking leaving the dog behind with its dog toys and dog dishes and dog bed? What did he think was going to happen?

Tortoises spend half their life in burrows, from October into April. Should you see a tortoise outside its burrow in the winter months it’s not well and veterinary assistance should be sought.

I managed to get the cork out with a screwdriver. It seemed to take me forever. My mother accepted a glass of wine without comment and we resumed talking about the plants she would put in that would provide food and shade for the tortoise. I wondered what she would do when everything was complete and it was very close to being complete. Grief is dangerous work, I thought again, but when you have overcome it and it passes away, are you not left more bewildered and defenceless than ever?

Instead, it turned out that my mother had not built the home for the as-yet-unrealized tortoise on her land. A real estate agent came out to see if the adjacent area would appraise out to make it worthwhile to subdivide and noted the error. The enclosure was well within her client’s property line and had to be removed.

Appraised out, my mother said. Who comes up with these dreadful phrases . . . I agreed that language was becoming uglier the more it was becoming irrelevant to our needs.

My mother took on the task of dismantling everything she had accomplished. She broke up the walls and trucked away the rubble. She even dug out the filled trench. Then she rough-raked the ground and rolled some of the large stones back into place. She left the few flowering shrubs and grasses she had so recently planted but without protection the birds and animals that are so seldom seen quickly consumed them. Such is their need.