The landscapers have come and gone, taming our overgrown jungle, once so wild and tangled. Now it is a tidy and respectable yard that any normal person would be pleased to have.

"I hope you get a chance to enjoy it some before you leave," the head landscaper said on his way out.

"It looks great!" I said. I did not say that I had enjoyed it the way it was before or that I had always thought there was something magical about the jungle. I did not say that the wildness was on purpose.

When I first moved into this house, I painted a poem on the ceiling of my bedroom with green paint. It was nice to have poetry to read in the night when the babies were at last asleep and I could hear the sounds of the trains when they came through town in the dark and the quiet.

It was a long poem and it took me two days to paint it. It is surprisingly hard to look straight up for two days. At the end of all that time balanced on a step-ladder with my head bent back, a paintbrush in one hand and a can of paint in the other, I had a newfound respect for Michelangelo. Painting just one poem on a ceiling almost permanently debilitated me. The Sistine Chapel must have been a bitch. But it was worth it for the poetry in the night.

Then, when we moved back into this house after our two-year Swiss sojourn, the movers who were carrying our boxes in assumed that we were new to the house. One of them saw the poem.

"Jeez," he said, scowling and perplexed. "Did ya buy this place from some Satan worshippers or something? There's a poem on the ceiling in there!"

I didn't tell him that I had painted it myself, that I had always thought there was something magical in it, that the poetry was on purpose. The Devil apparently speaks in rhymes -- the better to beguile us, I guess.

But the poem is gone now, too. Anyone normal would be happy to have this house.