The sun drew ants from their homes hidden in the lawn next to the sidewalk. She saw different kinds of ants on the concrete: tiny red ones stunned by the light and space, black ants cheerfully scurrying in straight paths over the sidewalk, their little shadows tucked under them, and big dark carpenter ants that seemed to row their way across the concrete, each as long as her thumbnail with legs like oars. Her head was downcast and she inspected the sidewalk ahead of her – any concrete lip more than a half-inch in height would prove impassible to her and so she had to exercise caution and, as she shuffled forward, leaning against the metal walker, she was careful to observe obstacles that might have dropped in her path: seed pods fallen from the trees on the boulevard that crunched under-foot, broken twigs swept down from branches overhead by a recent thunderstorm, forked sticks broken to show their white insides, more seeds shaped like the propellers of tiny helicopters, a scrap of paper, probably a receipt, yellowed by the rain, flies alighting on the pavement for an instant and, then, rising as she approached, a grey moth fluttering in the grass and more ants and a green beetle with iridescent shell and wings strolling in her shadow. The disease made her unsteady and her feet felt numb and hollow and her leg muscles no longer worked to lift her sole and heel and toe-tip more than a quarter-inch off the concrete. Before the stem-cell transplant, she wouldn’t have been able to make this excursion. But she had rallied a bit after that procedure and the day was cool with a gentle breeze whispering in the trees and, so, with her husband ahead of her, kicking debris out of the way, she ventured this last walk around the block. She supposed that someone watching would think her gait remarkably slow and painful, but, in fact, she felt invigorated and strong enough to walk the distance around that extended residential block, the length of two whole blocks on the long sides of the rectangle that she was traversing, one block crosswise and back, and, therefore, a total of six blocks distance, if she made the entire circuit.
She had come down the ramp built against the side of her house, slowly, step by step, and, then, made her way along the driveway to the sidewalk between the boulevard’s edge, lined with old trees, and the lawns. Facing the decision to go one direction or another where the driveway crossed the sidewalk, her husband beckoned, but she was feeling a bit ornery and independent this cool evening, and so she turned carefully in the opposite direction – her route was counter-clockwise around the block. Her husband shrugged to show that it didn’t matter to him and came quickly to her side and, then, a dozen steps ahead of her, staring down to scrutinize the concrete slabs set one after another to make the sidewalk. He was looking for irregularities, slumps in the cement and cracks, brushing larger sticks and seed pods to the side with his shoe to clear the way for her.
The next door neighbor’s house was impassive and silent. A bay window protruded a bit from the front of the home and, when she glanced over her shoulder in that direction, she saw a floral arrangement half-submerged in green shadow behind the glass, a still-life of flowers and sprigs of blossom. The flowers were artificial because they never changed and for many years had been there in the center of the bay-window pushed out over the carefully groomed lawn and the small shrubs manicured into spherical bulbs. Someone lived in the house, but she didn’t know that person. A couple of cheerful Mexican workers came to adjust the lawn and plants weekly. They played music from speakers in their truck when they worked – it sounded to her like polkas complete with singers whooping in a high-voice. She would have liked to speak to the Mexican lawn workers but they didn’t know English (or, at least, pretended incomprehension) and her High School Spanish wasn’t sufficient for anything more than a greeting. Probably, the home’s owner lived in a city far away and maintained the place for sentimental reasons. Thirty years earlier when she and her husband had moved to the neighborhood, an old couple lived in the home. They greeted her with a straw basket full of tomatoes and cucumbers and a couple of fragrant heads of cabbage picked from their garden. The old folks had roto-tilled a little plot of their backyard into exposed earth, pounding small trellis-shaped supports for the tomatoes into the soil. Some daisies grew around the garden and she recalled honey-bees browsing in the flowers. Something happened to the old man and woman shortly after she and her husband arrived and one day they were gone. A single-mother with kids moved into the place. She was too busy to maintain the garden and it was abandoned, a weedy patch next to the flimsy-looking swing set in the backyard. Then, she was gone also and the house seemed to be vacant, although, sometimes, people lived in the place for a couple months at a time, always coming and going at night and, then, there was an expensive SUV parked in the driveway on occasions and the floral arrangement appeared in the window but, now, she never saw anyone around.
The corner lot was large, fringed by a wilderness of old trees tall for the neighborhood. The trees were planted in two parallel rows and between them there was underbrush full of shadows and vines and secret places where children could hide under domes of green, fluttering leaves. On the grass boulevard, she saw a little bottle, empty and marked with a vodka label, the sort of thing you might buy on an airplane. A wasp was exploring the bottle’s open top. A battered sidewalk cut through the forest arranged around the edge of the lot. Her son, who was now grown up, used to play in that little woods, only two trees wide around the edge of the house. The home itself loomed over the trees, old and tall, with steep shingled gables. The Mormons lived in the house, a professional man and his wife. The kids were in Utah attending college. The house’s windows were mostly dark now – it seemed that the Saints occupied only two or three rooms in the big home. The Mormon wife once told her that she expected her children to finance part of their education by selling their blood. It was something that she had done as a young college girl in Salt Lake City. If you planned your diet carefully, you could produce enough blood to pay, at least, for your meals, a self-sustaining process to keep you well-fed and healthy enough to make more blood to pay for more breakfasts and lunches and suppers, at least if you were frugal and economized...
Some plantains spread between the cracks in the sidewalk. The spaces between concrete sidewalk panels were colonized by moss that was dull green in color. The trees here wept down propeller shaped seeds; the freshly fallen ones were pale green – the older ones were brown and grey. After turning the corner, she went about a hundred feet, not looking up at the Mormon’s old mansion-house because she knew it was there and knew what it looked like and didn’t really need to see it. These were places that she had seen if she looked and not seen if she didn’t for thirty years and, in the neighborhood, nothing much changed as far as the shape and surfaces of the houses were concerned, although to her left was an exception, a brand-new two-car garage cut into the wilderness edge of the Mormon’s yard, yellow and brown with slate-colored asphalt shingles. The garage sat on the site where an old carriage house had once been, a dismal-looking shed with a ruinous second story that looked half-collapsed. It was eye-sore and she was glad that it had been torn down and replaced by this neat-looking, efficient and modern garage. Across the street, some Sudanese people were barbecuing. She heard their voices and saw them behind a ragged hedge.
Another big house stood on the corner lot back-to-back with the Mormon’s place. This house was also very tall with a complicated roof comprised of many angles and slopes and pointed eaves. For most of the period that she had been on the block, the old Victorian house had been occupied by an ancient couple, an old lady who lived with her equally old, and much more decrepit, brother. The old man seemed to have no neck and either couldn’t speak, or didn’t want to. The old lady was shrill and talkative and always seemed to have a grievance against someone. She worked tirelessly in her lawn, tending to her banks of bright flowering lilies, raking leaves in season, and riding a lawn mower over the grass once a week at least. Her shrubs were tidy and carefully shaped and she swept her sidewalk every morning, collecting the dark brown seed pods in a wicker basket and, then, composting them in the corner of her lawn, under a wigwam made of crisscrossed branches dropped from her trees. An enclosed porch jutted from the side of the house and, before the old lady vanished, you could always see four mannequins sitting around a table next to the windows. The life-size mannequins sat on the porch immobile for twenty years at least, eyes always open and arms arranged to gesture to one another, an eerie display that fascinated the children in the neighborhood, when there had been children, and alarmed the adults as well although no one dared asked the old lady about the artificial people. She shuffled by the porch, pausing for a second to confirm that the mannequins were now gone. The dark windows opening into the enclosed porch showed nothing but shadow. The old man was gone one day – no one knew where he was but, probably, his sister been unable to care for him and he was confined to a nursing home where, of course, he shortly died. The old woman continued to maintain her lawn, pruning shrubs and watering her beds of bright flowers, but, then, she fell and broke her hip and this was expected to be the end of her, but she clung to life, and, even, made a come-back of sorts, rallying to walk around the block once a day in warm, dry weather, shoving a walker ahead of her just as Dora was doing herself this evening, and, for a moment, she thought that the old woman, who must have been in her nineties, had now become her sister or, perhaps, double, forging her way slowly and painfully down the sidewalk. Then, the old lady was gone also and the house stood vacant for a season and, when it was spring, the wire fence bounding the property was taken down and the rock garden with ferns and, even, a little cascade powered by an electric pump was plowed away and, after the lawn ornaments (a couple of cherubs and loyal-looking plaster dog) were removed, the house was sold to the mortician’s son who was from the neighborhood, now an adult who worked as a cook at a local grill, and, of course, she wondered, how the young man, scarcely thirty, could possibly afford such a large and prestigious house and, indeed, probably, he didn’t have the resources because the lawn had gone to seed and was now full of four-foot tall saplings, a whole forest of them that had taken root in the sod and the lilies with their ornate trumpet-shaped blossoms and long tongue-like pistils were overflowing the flower beds, poured out in a disorderly bright flood to crowd the sidewalk. And, so, she had come through the lilies and along the miniature forest and saw some rubble where the old woman’s rock garden had been and, then, she was at the corner where she paused to rest.
The house across the street was where a drug-dealer had lived. The man was supposed to be commercial pilot, although this was all rumor. A strange flat boulder marked the corner of his lot. The boulder was waist-tall with pale veins of white crystal, set on the grass like some kind of warning. In the back yard, there was a small swimming pool, now hidden under a canvas tarp. Once, there had been a round disk affixed to the back wall above the little pool. The disk was plastic or, perhaps, some sort of molded stucco and was covered with outlandish figures, glyphs and bas relief animals and, at its center, there was a hideous god, a grimacing solar mask extruding a tongue that was sharp as a knife. It was an Aztec sun-stone, or, more accurately, a facsimile of that artifact, acquired by the drug-dealing pilot during one of his trips to and from Belize. The home had been raided at dawn. Someone who was out then, walking a dog, saw the squad cars drawn up around the house at odd angles and the smashed-in door and the husband and wife, scarcely dressed at all, led across the sidewalk in handcuffs to a waiting federal marshal’s SUV. The house was forfeited as the fruit of an illegal narcotics transaction and, later, auctioned, purchased by a business associate of the pilot who lived in the place one week a month, possibly to establish homestead for tax purposes and, although the people were shadowy, even engaged in criminal enterprises, she supposed, they kept up the place and made sure that the shrubs were trimmed and grass mowed.
“Dora,” her husband asked her, “are you okay?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m just catching my breath a little.”
Her legs were weak, but she had good upper body strength still, and so she pulled herself forward, more brittle walnut-brown seed pods under foot. The lesbians lived in the house to her left, both educators at the High School. Their garage was open and a Top 40 song was blaring from a radio, but no one was around to listen to the catchy tune that seemed suddenly very big and colorful spreading out across the concrete driveway and the lawn and the trees. The lesbians were always involved in home remodeling projects and she saw timber stacked in their garage and the blade of a circular saw exposed above its metal table with serrated, flame-shaped teeth glinting in the sunbeams raking down the street. Then, there was an empty lot where a house had been demolished – Dora had no memory of that place – and, after that, the white cottage-like home where the Trump supporters lived, their American flag hung over their stoop upside-down and a blue Trump banner suspended above the side-door. An elderly man and his son had lived in the house before the Trumpers acquired it – the old man had a white beard and kept a life-size ceramic German shepherd next to the driveway in his side-yard, probably a scarecrow-canine to deter thieves. The handsome ceramic German shepherd was gone now, replaced by three flesh-and-blood dogs who pranced back and forth, chained to the house, barking at her as she shuffled forward. The sound of these dogs inspired others to take up the chorus. In a handsome, Dutch colonial house across the street, a tiny dog, locked inside, began chirping like a bird. Dora didn’t know the family but was aware that there was a pretty High School girl who lived there – a sign congratulating the 2021 graduate was posted in the yard and, once, when her husband was driving her past the place, she had seen the girl in her white Prom dress posing for photographs taken by a friend (also in an evening gown) and her mother.
The street on this block had been recently resurfaced and she could faintly smell the odor of fresh asphalt. Little signs marking where fiber-optic cable was going to be laid were stabbed into the sod. A couple of dandelions decorated the edge of the sidewalk. Some of the slabs were new, white as freshly laundered linen, but others were old, worn, with rough aggregate surfaces. In one slab, she saw a mark: CONCRETE IDEA - 5-14-08. She was astonished, at first, that the concrete was over a hundred years old, but, then, remembered that it was a new millennium, although she had spent more than half of her life during the last decades of the 20th century and 08 meant 2008. Across the street, there was another vacant lot, a place where there had once been a little house where an old lady lived with her mentally retarded daughter – sometimes, she saw them walking arm-in-arm to the small bus that took handicapped people around town to their appointments. The old lady died and the mentally retarded daughter just vanished, as is often the case with people with disabilities who have no one left to love them, and, then, their house vanished also, bulldozed into its cellar, and, for another five years, there was a fractured sidewalk leading to nowhere and a stub of driveway also leading nowhere, remnants of the demolished home, but, then, these cement-fragments were also jack-hammered away and hauled-off in a dump truck and, now, the lawn was a meadow where nettles grew and thistles and white clover where there should have been bees but there were not – Dora had read that some virus was killing all the bees...
On her side of the road, Dora passed the house of the retired meatpacking inspector at the plant – dead for more than a decade – and the house of a foreman at that same packing plant, identical white houses with steep roofs and lofty attic space built next to one another. The foreman and the meat inspector were married to identical twins, neat and sweet-smelling little old ladies. Once Dora had attended a tea party that one of sisters had hosted with a little brunch also served and the old ladies, who looked exactly alike and were accustomed to dressing in identical frocks, said that they were going to eat their ice cream desserts before they tasted the petite open-faced sandwiches and chilled fruit: “We are eating our dessert first,” the one old lady said, giggling, and her sister said: “We are eating our dessert first” as well. Then, they both ate their desserts first and giggled at their audacity. The sorrow of their lives was that their husbands were mortal enemies: forty years earlier the meat inspector had insulted the meat cutter in the plant, before the eyes of God and witnesses, and shamed him and there had been a celebrated fistfight in the slaughterhouse parking lot and, from that day onward, the two men never spoke to one another again, except to occasionally hurl an insult and taunt. Dora assumed that they were all long gone. The two houses looked forlorn, their windows dark with shadow.
Some heroes lived across the street. They were young men, roommates, who had enlisted in the National Guard and, upon returning from the War, rented the old house where the Community College chemistry professor, retired and very deaf, had once lived. After returning from Iraq, the young men hosted parties that went all night long and ended with brawls in the alley that upset prowling cats and garbage cans, and, sometimes, they shot off fireworks in the dead of night, but no one dared complain because, after all, the men were war veterans and, therefore, heroes. Sometimes, one or the other of they young men would meet a girl and move in with her and, even, have a couple children with that woman – but the relationships never worked out and the soldiers returned to their barracks in the old chemistry professor’s house and, even now, she saw the men, now no longer as young as she remembered them, balding and a little flabby with some girls and children, drinking beer and barbecuing over a fire-pit in the backyard, a big orange flame burning there and, of course, strictly forbidden because of the protracted drought, but no one dared to call the police and, even, the cops were a little intimidated by the heroes who had, after all, risked their lives in the deserts of Iraq.
She paused for a second and looked down the street and saw that the lawyer was sitting on his porch, a book on his lap, and his yellow Labrador was chained on the porch next to him and scrutinizing her and, it seemed to her, that she would have no choice but to exchange greetings with that man, a tedious and argumentative fellow with a white beard like an old-time preacher. Between where she stood, resting for a moment, and the lawyer’s porch with its two hanging flower baskets trailing blossoms down almost to the ground, she saw the home of the suicide, a sad place like a haggard L-shaped farmhouse far out in the country, walls raw with peeling paint and shingles disheveled above the drooping gutters. The man who lived in that house had been depressed, although no one knew this, and was unhappy at work (he managed a complex of hog houses across the border in Iowa), fearful that the corporation by which he was employed was preparing to fire him, and he had some credit card debt, as well, that he didn’t think he could pay if he lost his job. And, so, he used a captive bolt gun to kill himself with a shot to the middle of his forehead and that was that. The man was a good Catholic and supported the parochial schools in town, and the local priest, who was a humane fellow, reasoned that his parishioner was the victim of a fatal illness, untreated depression, and so didn’t hesitate to bury the suicide in consecrated ground in the cemetery south of town – this offended the suicide’s brother who was also a Catholic priest and he said that if suicide were not punished by burial in unconsecrated earth outside of the sacraments of the Holy Mother Church, then, of course, everyone would commit suicide because life is a burden at times, indeed, an intolerable burden. Dora thought of the funeral and the gaunt, villainous face of the priest who was the suicide’s brother, and she thought to herself that life was a blessing even if it involved suffering and that every moment of life was a gift and that she was not dying of a fatal disease but living with it – that was how she dealt with things. And, so, she turned away from the sad house and looked across the street to where the Mexican immigrants lived, their stucco home painted the bright color of marigolds and their hydrangeas blooming under their windows and, then, she was on the sidewalk next to where the lawyer lived and he called out to her and she called out to him in reply. They exchanged a few words and the old Labrador uttered a couple of deep, guttural barks, just to show that she was also present and watching over the front steps and the porch with the overflowing flower baskets and, then, a neighbor in a big white SUV cruised up on the street behind her and said her name and this was relief so that she didn’t have to continue the futile conversation with the tedious lawyer. The neighbor lady in the white SUV had once been one of the town’s greatest beauties, married to a civic booster who had retired from promoting the our city through its Chamber of Commerce. Her husband was accustomed to mowing the lawn almost entirely naked, wearing a Speedo swimsuit and flip-flops, his bare chest and belly covered in a pelt of white hair. As a young man, the former beauty’s husband had played drums with a local rhythm section that had once performed behind Louis Armstrong, the great jazz trumpeter, and there was a signed picture of the musician in their home, above the piano that she had never really been able to play. Her husband was on the City Council for a number of years and well-liked by all and, then, cancer carried him off so that he shrunk into a withered little old man almost over night and no longer had the strength to mow his lawn (his wife performed that task) and, then, he was gone but the great beauty still lived in the neat home, shaped like a gingerbread house with an elaborate, carved lattice above the porch, just around the corner. So the neighbor-lady, who retained some of her former great beauty, said to her: “I will go for a walk with you, Dora.” And Dora’s husband lingered a little bit ahead of his wife on the sidewalk, gazing suspiciously at the yellow Labrador who gazed suspiciously back at him and Dora said yes, that she would like to go for a walk with the neighbor-lady whose husband had played with Louis Armstrong and who had been on the City Council and, then, the white SUV glided away and Dora felt a little bad about misleading the neighbor-lady because she wasn’t likely to ever go for a walk with her despite what she had said. She moved forward and lawyer said goodbye to her and, then, she approached the house where the contractor lived, a place that was perpetually under construction with pale grey Tyvek wrapping under the eaves and stapled to the outer walls of the house where the siding had been removed and this was the corner now and she looked at the lawn ornaments in the shrubs at the contractor’s house, a painted clay frog and a mouse hoisting drinks under a sign that said HAPPY HOUR and some ducks and little Dutch children under a shrub and a row of lights in stakes embedded in the ground that caught the sun’s rays when the sun was shining and stored energy so as to glimmer, like stationary fireflies, when it was night and dark, and, there were also Christmas tree lights tangled in the shrubbery and, then, there was the house of the man that rode motorcycles that made a loud roar early in the morning and the place where the ER nurse lived with her most recent boyfriend and her three children, all with different men, a very kind and efficient woman who had helped her several times when her sickness forced into the hospital and there was an alley and a flowering lilac that drizzled petals onto the sidewalk and the white house with a steel-link fence where the old lady had lived until she died quite suddenly, only a week after a windstorm had toppled the big maple tree in her front lawn, dropping it onto the grass where it lay with enormous branches sprawled next to a great wave of leaves, some of the limbs covering the sidewalk so that you couldn’t walk around the fallen tree without venturing out onto the curb and, even, into the street. When the tree fell, Dora wasn’t yet much afflicted and she could raise her feet high enough to traverse a curb and so she had to go out into the street to walk around the leafy obstacle on the sidewalk and the old lady was standing on her front step gazing with amazement at the fallen tree and Dora had said to her: “It’s terrible about your tree,” and the old lady replied: “If it’s not one thing it’s another,” – a true enough statement because only a week later (and only a couple days after the tree service had hacked up the fallen maple and trucked it away), the old lady suddenly died and people came to watch the hearse haul her body away and her front yard was littered still with broken twigs and windrows of pale, yellowish sawdust left by the chainsaws that had dismembered the tree.
A white picket fence had once fronted the art teacher’s place, perfectly proportioned with a swinging gate under an arched trellis where vines were once entangled, all bedecked with little purplish flowers. The art teacher had a big beard and hair like a hippie from the sixties and Dora remembered him as very witty and cynical and, so, she imagined the Tom Sawyer fence as an ironic fixture in his yard, something that wasn’t meant to be taken seriously like the pink flamingos hovering over his rose bushes or the tire swing slung from the tree that always seemed a little sinister to her, a rubber bulls-eye with vaguely sexual implications dangling down from the green bower of the oak. The art teacher was gone now and the people who lived in the house had little children (the teacher had been childless, of course) and she saw a plastic wading pool under the tree from which the tire swing had once hung – it was also gone and the picket fence as well with it’s arched gate and trellis rooted up by the new people when they took possession. Apparently, the current owners of the place didn’t appreciate irony, but the purple paint decorating the facade was still intact and the bright yellow shutters and she wondered about the rec room in the basement, the pool table and the mural between mirrors behind the bar where a naked man was painted, a life-size figure with brawny shoulders and straining arms who was pulling himself up out of the pit of hell, the image extremely foreshortened, an eye of fire tickling the man’s rounded buttocks and, on the shelves, strange liqueurs with colors like chemicals used in lab experiments and candelabra on corner tables, the dull glint of brass in the shadows – she had been there once for a neighborhood block party and toured the house, inspecting the teacher’s paintings and the paintings of his gifted students, some of them, then, studying at art institutes all around the country, and the place was full of marvels. What had happened to all of that stuff? At the corners of the lot, deep sockets marked where the picket fence had been anchored, bottomless black holes piercing the grass close enough to the sidewalk to pose a hazard to pedestrians and dogs and, Dora thought, not safe for the children who lived in the art teacher’s house and who splashed in the round plastic wading pool in hot weather. She had seen them in from her front yard because now she was coming close to home, the circuit of the block almost completed, a good thing because the strain on her back and shoulders was telling on her and each step came with a certain amount pain, so far good pain, she thought, although soon enough it would become something to be suffered...
Nazis lived across the street. She had seen a flag with a swastika hanging in their garage among the garden hoses and rakes and brooms. The two Nazis were young men, only a little older than Dora’s son, and they lived with two women who were, perhaps, sisters and there were small children in the house, nursing babes in arms, because, sometimes. the girls sat on the front stoop holding their children as they fed them, something that would have been an outrage, probably, to the old unmarried woman who had lived in the place, inherited from her parents, for more than 30 years before she became too old to live alone and had to move to assisted living – an awful thing, Dora thought, to lose you independence and be at the mercy of others, even those favorably inclined to you. The Nazis had put up a basketball hoop, perching precariously on step-ladders too short for the project, and, once the backboard and hoop were installed, the next-door neighbors who were Black kids shot baskets with them, no one keeping score because if a tally were maintained that would lead to quarrels and quarrels lead to fights and fights would lead to the cops being called, something that neither the Nazis nor the Black kids wanted and, so, Dora saw the orange basketball thudding against the backboard and the girls with their babies at their breasts sitting on the concrete stoop and the Nazis and the Black kids taking turns shooting baskets from various locations on the driveway and not keeping count of baskets made as opposed to misses and, perhaps, that white face peering through an upper window beneath the round oculus in the center of the facade (the house was an imitation of Georgian era terrace), those pale luminous features like a skull was the old maid who had lived in the house and was now, somehow, confined to an airless upstairs room while the game of hoops played out beneath her endlessly in the twilight.
Then, there was the house on the corner, made from brick where no one ever lived for more than two seasons – the city councilman’s wife, a famous beauty formerly, had resided in our town all her life and she knew the histories of every house and every family, who was related to whom, what the maiden names had been, legitimate children and illegitimate, and she had told Dora once that a child had died in that brick house and that it was a sad place and that when it was hot, in the days before air-conditioning, for three days the inside of the home would remain cool as a cavern, moist and shadowy, and, then, on the fourth day, the bricks would radiate heat inward and the rooms would become a kiln, warm as an oven baking bread, and unbearable and, in fact, when cooler weather arrived, the house would retain its nightmarish heat for several more days before becoming chilly again. It was always too cold or too hot in the house and that may have been part of the reason that the child died, although who knows? And, beside that corner house, there was another noble-looking edifice, built entirely of brick, with hunter-green shutters, and this was where the mortician had lived, or, possibly, still lived – he had another place in Tucson, apparently and, so, he wasn’t around much any more. His son had beat his pet dog to death on the front lawn, a horrible spectacle that no one talked much about and that Dora, who loved dogs, didn’t want to remember at all, particularly since this boy had grown up and bought the house where the old woman had lived with her brother with a roomful of store mannequins for company and, then, there was a vacant lot that had always been there, at least so long as Dora recalled, a grassy plot behind a fence with iron spear-points guarding a hedge of ancient lilac bushes and, then, another noble-looking brick edifice, the twin of the mortician’s home where a divorced lady lived with her four dogs, then, the home with a sign advertising that it was a “dog park” which seemed to Dora to be a violation of our zoning ordinances and, another, empty lot with a stained sidewalk running between banks of dragonish orange flowers to where the house had been. Dora recalled that the place had been ramshackle with a porch collapsing from rot and, always, a couple of wrecked cars littering the driveway, the place where the former submarine sailor lived, a sort of wild man drawing a pension and, perhaps, on disability as well, with a wife and two daughters who never seemed fully clothed to her, cats crawling all over the decaying furniture that had been lugged out onto that rotten porch to die there, motorcycles always coming and going until the day that the former submarine sailor was mangled in a wreck and lost his leg and, then, he didn’t venture out any more and the motorcycles sat in dark pools of oil gathering dust and all was melancholy, the girls growing up and leaving and the shingles peeled off the roof by storms, both winter and summer, and, then, the chimney at the ridge-line fell over and the pipe sprawled across the shredded roof and, even after the old submariner had died, you could still smell the skunk of marijuana lingering on the derelict porch and over the ruined cars and motorcycles, so much dope smoked on the premises that the Flame Calla lilies with their orange and yellow throats exhaled that smell. Then, the house was demolished but the lilies somehow remained, a mystery to Dora because she thought that the flowers sprung from bulbs and that the bulbs had to be dug out of the ground each year and stored in cool, dry place, but, of course, there was no one to perform that service now that the wretched house had been demolished and hauled away to the landfill and the one-legged sailor’s wife and girls were scattered and only the sidewalk remained and the strange persistent flowers.
Dora was tired now and thought that, perhaps, it would be best to have her husband get the wheelchair from their house, only a hundred feet away, but, resting, she felt her strength returning, not all of it but enough to forge ahead and reach home under her own power. Her head drooped between her shoulders and it had now become quite dark and, when her husband called to her, she heard him as if he were calling from a great distance.
The street lamps came on and little moths rose out of the grass to greet the light.
If you live in a place long enough, she thought, the landscape embodies a chronicle of loss, people who have died or gone away, although, also, Dora supposed a chronicle of new beginnings, new families making a fresh start, but, somehow, the losses seemed more poignant than the new beginnings which would soon enough, she supposed, turn into yet other losses because this is the nature of human life, one thing follows another and, so, she leaned forward a little and her feet shuffled a step and, then, another step and she was underway once more.
The pavement was marked with scribbles of paint, odd declarations and signs that she couldn’t decipher. Some sort of utility work was scheduled for this part of the sidewalk and those designing the work had marked the slabs, painting on the old concrete. She saw some square brackets in orange paint, then, a blue hatchmark extending half-way across the concrete panel. A couple of arrows in yellow had been drawn on the sidewalk and the number 27 followed by some enigmatic symbols. Ahead of her, the sidewalk slab was marked SOW – although, then, realized that she was reading the letters upside-down and that they spelled NOS. The next slab, she read as SOT with a backwards “S” and the “T” also inverted, but, then, turning her head saw that the letters were actually TOS above some more marks including an orange triangle. Above the letters on the pavement, another white house shone in the darkness, faintly lit by the street-lamp swarmed with moths – this was her next-door neighbor, someone that she had never seen and never heard, the house well-kept and, even, a “Neighborhood Watch” decal pasted in the corner of a window, and the flower boxes full of geraniums, but no one ever present in the home and, then, at last, she had come full-circle and her own house stood above the white apron of her driveway, also pale as a cloud, the FOR SALE sign marked “SOLD” at its bottom and posted next to her hydrangeas (something that seemed very odd to her –was this really her home?) She thought of her children when they were had been small and remembered their dogs and all the birthdays they had celebrated, the Thanksgivings and Christmases, the small emergencies, the times when everyone was happy and getting along so well that you might want to fall down on your knees and pray that this moment would never end, that it would last forever, but, of course, such prayers aren’t answered, and shouldn’t be. A light was burning in the window and Dora knew that there were two wooden chairs in the dining room set around a folding table on which they had eaten take-out from Mexican café down the street and, in the next room, was Dora’s wheelchair and her hospital bed big as a boat and her husband’s little cot and, tomorrow, none of those things would remain in the house, now otherwise empty because, of course, they were moving to place that was more handicap-accessible. She paused and looked up at the house with its dark incommunicative windows and shadowy eaves and thought that she would miss the place and the old neighborhood, but this was her last stroll around the block and the end she thought.
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