Neighborhood

Occasionally I walk here, when the weather permits.  

Today I spot a man watering his garden, a riot of grasses and Yarrow bushes colonized by bees, prairie flowers penned up with Zinnias. A tall and forbidding something with bulbous green knobs that attracts wasps, which the gardener identifies as Rattlesnake Master.

He says the garden harbors hummingbirds, or maybe only one that sometimes comes right up to his face and flutters its wings as if to thank him.

Throughout the neighborhood numbered streets loop off of numbered avenues, like math problems with many possible solutions. It is possible to lose your way.

Simple bungalows with complicated angles line the quiet streets, stucco and brick with gingerbread accents. I long to gaze in the windows at night, when faux antique lamps are lit, to see the occupants eating, reading, watching TV. Miming conversations I cannot hear.

But I never walk here at night.  As an elderly woman I cannot take such chances.

Still, in the daylight worrisome situations reveal themselves, like a dusty room exposed to sunlight. A lawn scorched by chemical treatment, a patio with broken furniture mended by duct tape. Hints of mold and spots of rot.

I ignore these things or take them in stride. Overall the neighborhood suits me. The vegetative flourishes, the eccentric houses have the feel of a mythical village that appears Brigadoon-like, only when I enter.

When I was a child my brother and I were sent off to the fields surrounding our house with Velveeta cheese sandwiches, and apples we neglected to eat. We played at games I no longer remember, but there was risk and there were riddles of our own making to solve, all on our own.

I feel as if I have wandered these streets forever. As if the gardens sprang up for me and arranged themselves not only to my liking, but for my survival. I am at home, no longer young and hinged together at all the wrong junctures.

The neighborhood shelters me, who I have become.

Sometimes I imagine creeping into someone’s garden, into the man’s garden perhaps. There I might succumb to the elegance of adaptation, allow my sooty feathers to catch the sun and glow with spectral colors, a whir of wings in the fading light.