Stolen

We've lived in our current home for about 15 years.  When we first moved in, I brought with me some bell shaped stainless steel thingies that I'd purchased at a salvage place and painted to look like aged copper.  For several years these had perched atop concrete drain pipe pillars at our old place in a "less desirable" part of town and were filled with plants.  As a special welcome to our new, "better" neighborhood, the pots were emptied of their contents and stolen within a few weeks of my putting them out.  Before we had gates with locks, our gardens (side and back yards, not just the parts facing the sidewalks)  were periodically vandalized.  Plants would be pulled up, etc.  A couple of times, every ornamental thing in the garden that wasn't a plant or a pot was stolen.  Someone must have come along with a truck and had a day of it.  Since we've had locking gates for the last few years, we've been fairly lucky.  The only thing stolen was a broken stained glass window that was covering an opening in the fence.  Someone decided they needed the basically worthless panel and wiggled it through the opening from the outside.  Other than that, nothing had been taken in about four years, until now.  I just watered this plant in it's planter a couple of days ago but when I was  out watering on Sunday, both the planter and plant were gone.

I looked all around the area where the pot was thinking that the recent wind and/or our racoon friends might have had something to do with it falling over or perhaps moving to a slightly different location but no, it was just gone.  Someone had come into our garden and taken just this one thing. 

As is usually the case when people steal our property,  we may miss the things, especially those with sentimental value or that cannot be replaced, but the feeling of someone violating our space is far more disturbing than the loss itself.   All the thoughts about who, why, and how start running through my head along with the worry about someone returning. 

One of the nice things about blogging is that it's caused me to take a lot more pictures of my garden.  At least now I have the photograph to remind me of what this unhappy guy looked like.