My Latin gardener has "disappeared."

[Silver Gaia]

48. Same here. We dont have a lawn. We took that out

years ago and replaced it with fruit trees, shrubs, and roses. Great, right? Yes, but... all those trees, shrubs, and roses need to be pruned, plus the huge leaves the neighbor's giant sycamore dumps in our yard are very hard to remove easily. It has been difficult but we love our yard this way, only now, we are both getting too old to keep up with it.

So, we hired the lawn care guy who does our neighbor's yard once a week. It's an added expense we have to plan for, but I am the younger of the two of us and it had all fallen on me to do alone, so I am so happy we found a way to do this.

I know little about him or the young guys who work for him. I don't speak Spanish, and his English is spotty, so it's not like we can be chatty. But I CARE about him, and I CARE about his workers. They are nice. They smile and they do great work. They have helped me immensely.

I'm telling you all this because I simply don't know their status, but he prefers cash payment, so I suspect he may be undocumented. It hurts my heart to think they may not return, that their families could be torn apart. It is my hope that my state will protect them.

Just because I don't know the intimate details of this man's life or of his workers, does not mean I dont care about him. It just means he is a private person who says little about himself, even when I ask, in part because we have a language barrier.