The Gratitude Audit

Ivy was twenty-nine and she paid a woman named Donnie eighty dollars a session to tell her things like "you are blocking your own abundance." Donnie was in her forties, had a voice like warm honey poured over gravel, and smelled faintly of sage. Ivy went every other Thursday, partly because it helped and partly because watching a life coach struggle with a jammed office window was better than cable.

This particular Thursday, Donnie had spent forty minutes on the topic of self-sabotage. She'd made Ivy say "I deserve good things" out loud, which Ivy had done in the tone of someone reading a parking ticket.

"You know what would help you?" Donnie said at the end, digging through her canvas tote. "Gratitude. Active, written gratitude."

"Donnie, I don't journal."

"It's not journaling. It's a soul practice." Donnie held out a small notebook. It had a leather cover, fake, and a gold sun on it, also fake. "I made these myself. Bound them at that little print shop on Fulton. Take it. Parting gift. I'm moving my practice to Sedona."

"Sedona. Of course you are."

"Write one thing a day you're grateful for. Or one thing you want to change. The journal knows the difference."

"The journal knows the difference," Ivy repeated, taking it anyway, because free was free.

She went home to her rental house with the leaky faucet and ate cold pad thai over the sink. The journal sat on the counter, smug. Around ten she picked up a pen, just to prove a point to nobody.

*Grateful for: not living next to Greg's lawn,* she wrote. *That man mows in perfect diagonal stripes like he's being graded. I hope his grass gets a disease. A tiny, polite disease.*

She underlined "polite" for no reason and went to bed.

Readers, you have already guessed what happened. Ivy had not.

She woke to a lawnmower, which was normal, and then a scream, which was not. She padded out in yesterday's shirt and looked over the fence. Greg, thirty, her neighbor of two years, stood in the middle of his lawn with his hands on his head. The grass was gone. Not brown. Not patchy. Gone. The whole yard was smooth dirt, except for one single blade of grass standing in the exact center like a period at the end of a sentence.

"What happened?" Ivy called, way too fast, way too innocent.

"I don't know!" Greg's voice cracked. "I did everything right! I thatched! I aerated." He looked at the lone blade. "It's a disease. A polite disease. It left me one."

Ivy closed her curtain and stood in her hallway with her heart going hard. Wait. She checked the journal. The entry was still there. Her handwriting. Her joke. The word "polite" underlined in her own sarcastic little hand.

No way.

She needed a test. Something small. Something deniable. She sat at the kitchen table and wrote: *Grateful for: Greg's dog barking a little less.*

The dog's name was Buttons and he was a beagle who treated sunrise like a personal enemy. Within a minute the barking outside slowed, and then stopped entirely, and then Greg came out and stood over Buttons looking baffled while Buttons sat there, quiet, polite, almost apologetic.

Okay. Okay okay okay.

Ivy should have stopped there. She wanted it on record, for herself, in her own journal even, that she knew she should have stopped there. She did not stop there.

The next entry: *Grateful for: Greg's lawn gnome facing his house instead of mine.* Done by lunch. Greg spent an afternoon turning it back. It turned back. He turned it again. It turned again. At one point he just waved at it like it was a coworker.

Then: *Grateful for: Greg's sprinklers only watering his own lawn.* They'd always overshot onto her walkway and she'd never once mentioned it. That evening the sprinkler heads rotated with surgical precision. Not one drop crossed the property line. It looked scripted.

Then it got worse, in the way things get worse when you're having fun. *Grateful for: Greg's wind chimes being silent.* Gone. *Grateful for: Greg's grill smoking toward his own windows instead of mine.* His burgers came out fine but the smoke rose straight up like a column, and Greg stood there watching it, arms crossed, mouth open.

By Friday she'd written *Grateful for: Greg's leaf blower having a mute button,* and he'd spent twenty minutes pressing places on the machine that no mute button had ever been. He looked up at her window at one point and mouthed, "is this you?"

Ivy mouthed back nothing and shut the blinds.

Greg got his revenge on Saturday. She woke to her own yard striped in perfect diagonals. He had mowed HER lawn. At six a.m. There was a note pinned to the door: "Since you love my lawn so much, now you have one. You're welcome. Also give my yard back."

He had written a note. On cardstock. With a border.

Ivy sat down with the journal like it was a war room. She had a line ready: *Grateful for: Greg learning some boundaries.* She wrote it, felt briefly like a bad person, wrote it anyway, and hit the pillow.

Monday morning there was a knock. Then another. Then a third, spaced like a metronome.

"Ivy?" Greg said through the door. "Hi. Sorry. So sorry. Quick question. When you fertilize, do you do it before or after the rain? Because online there's, there's a lot of disagreement, and I trust you now, weirdly. Also, hi. Sorry. Is this a bad time?"

She opened the door. He was holding a clipboard. An actual clipboard.

"Greg. What is this."

"Boundaries," he said brightly. "I'm learning them. I'm starting with yours. This is me respecting yours by knocking first. Three knocks. I read that somewhere. So, fertilizer?"

"You mowed my lawn at six in the morning."

"That was retaliation and I regret it. Look, I've been up since four. I have questions about mulch. Also, and this is unrelated, I'm getting divorced."

Ivy blinked. "You're what?"

"Six months ago. Well, we signed in March. So, March." He shifted the clipboard. "She hated the lawn. Said it was like being married to a golf course. I kept doing it anyway. I don't know why I'm telling you this. It's coming out of me like a faucet. Is that the journal? Donnie gave me one a few weeks ago, I think. Mine just makes me nap."

Oh, thought Ivy. Oh no. Oh, he's a person.

"Come in," she heard herself say. "Not because of the journal. Because you look like someone who hasn't slept."

Greg sat at her kitchen table and told her, unbidden, between mulch questions, that his dad had been a groundskeeper and mowing was the only way he knew how to feel close to him. That his ex was named Gina and she was probably right about everything. That Buttons was technically the ex's dog and Greg had fought for custody of a beagle and won, and he'd never told anyone he was proud of that, and now here he was telling Ivy.

"I didn't know any of that," Ivy said quietly.

"Well. Boundaries," Greg said, tapping his temple. "Turns out the opposite of boundaries isn't