The Secret Garden of Alcazar

Maybe every neighborhood has one; a house cloaked in mystery, whether benign or sinister, that only the nearby residents are aware of. The gangster, haunted, wealthy, nudist, hippie rock band, dead kid, or maybe even space alien house. Ours wasn't sinister, it just didn't look like it belonged on our street. Instead of the usual Clairemont ranch style tan box, this house looked like a Zen meditation clinic. It seemed lower and longer than usual and was a dusty rose color with a wider entryway than it's neighbors. Flanking the door (with it's knob in the center -not at the edge like an American door) was that wavy glass you can't really see through. The whole place looked peacefully Chinese and I'm sure it would have made a perfect home for a wind chime collector. Seeing a car in the driveway was the rarest of events and usually sparked a week of whispering and speculation.
Being a pack of eleven-year-olds, some of whom had read Tom Sawyer, we were certain to try to learn more about this strange house and it's occupants. We had already discovered the wonderful secret of the run-down house on the corner; they had a marvelous array of owls, ravens and other birds of prey in the backyard which we were told not to even look at. It turns out that if you look directly at a B-O-P, they take it to mean you want to make them lunch and get very offended.
We decided to look at the mysterious back yard for clues as to our unseen neighbors. A swing set, swimming pool, putting green, anything that would shed some light. What we found was a garden with three key ingredients. 1) a tangelo tree with juicy sweet ripe fruit in ample supply; 2) a small bamboo patch with stalks flexible enough to catapult surplus tangelos into the sky; and 3) an avocado tree. We didn't care much for avocados, but Ricky's mom liked them enough to give us her proxy permission to enter the back yard on the condition that we brought her back the goods. For some reason, the tangelos were treasure to us, but the undesired avocados were dirty things the birds had probably contaminated.
We never got caught. I've never had a store bought tangelo as good. Maybe I should buy a tree, put up some barbed wire and wait for summer. In the mean time I can only envy the Zen nudist rock stars as they await their mothership.
Steve