Moses unloads groceries while talking on his cell phone. I cross the street to my house after leaving Tom's place, laughing at Adam and the neighbor boys who'd been running in the automatic sprinklers in Tom's back yard, their shirts soaked and sticking to their small bodies. Their giggles and smiles are contagious. It's hot, 80's, but breezy, and slight wisps of clouds stitch across a sky of indescribable blue. Coming home is like this. The little things and the big things, all taken in and appreciated all the more because of the journey that preceded the homecoming. We live to come home. Or, better put, I do.
While we were gone, the cosmos came into their feathery fullness and started spilling frilly blooms all over. The tallest sunflower is easily 10 feet. Echinacea punches pink skirts against the weathered fence, a dance troupe of petals, romantic as it sounds, it is. The patty pan squash that was barely eeking along when we left is now a plant of green umbrellas and bright yellow blooms. Finally we succeeded in growing these oft'fickle cousins of the prolific zucchini, which we also have, in abundance. But of course! Jokes about zuke crops in the West are legion. Really, someone needs to figure out how to harness the energy zukes use to grow so massive and start feeding that energy to the electrical grid.
Our sun gold tomatoes are bursting with golden balls of winey sweetness, and the lettuce...there's something about our lettuce thatreminds me ofold seed packet illustrations (the seed is, fittingly, from the Seed Savers Exchange) sketched in charcoal and painted in muted colors. We returned to poured concrete deck stairs-one the shape of a piano, its contour following the curve of a plum tree-slabs atop chunks of sandstone colored rock that Giles -our dearest, our designer, our resident genius-brought from his land in Glenwood. He'd also managed, in his time as housesitter extraordinaire, to redesign the fountain and the flow of the water, hang lights in many of the trees and connect them all to one electrical strip conveniently hidden in an under-the-deck-bench closet, and build a hanging, twirling sculpture out of plywood, brads, paint and nails that calls to mind a whimsical island people.
Giles refers to the backyard as our Grotto. It is more than I ever imagined this space could be, so many stories that accompany every contour and plant, every bed, each stone and piece of concrete freely given or found or, in the case of the work Giles has done, a spatial blessing that defies time. We couldn't buy this kind of intuition, or his kind of vision. We know it and he knows it. It's simply amazing what love and friendship can do.
Our deck is an additionalliving room, pushing our 925 sq. ft. home out and into our little Eden. This last week S. rented a tiller and prepped the last of the mud yard for sod...today I look out to a lovely expanse of green that rings the plum in the center of the backyard-the 60+ year old plum that was an eyesore, that friends encouraged us to cut down but S. loved and protected fiercely-and leads to the beautiful tangle of flowers and veggies in the garden.
It's taken more than 7 years to get to this point-a testament to patience, a cautionary tale for those who buy cheap old houses in Cole and then want change and progress and new right NOW-but here we are, and the wait was so worth it. One has to live with a space to understand its personality and its quirks. We couldn't have built this deck until we knew how we wanted to use the backyard, how it would be separated into individual "spaces," and such things emerge over time, not overnight. We always knew we wanted a deck, but what kind? And how much would it cost us? We bid a contractor a few years back who, for 6K, offered to build us a boring single level deck coming right out the back door. "That's a contractor speaking," said Giles, his nose slightly out of joint, "not a designer." He was right.
Next door, Brian is putting a new roof on his garage. We woke this morning to the sound of hammering, but thankfully they waited until 8 a.m. to start. Apparently there was more damage to the roof than Brian thought originally, so it's taking more money to fix, but "it has to be done," he said, and he's right. The gutters were falling off of one side (I watched this over a period of days, afternoon boomers coming in and weakening the already-weak connection between gutter and fascia even more, until the gutter just hung from the corner of the roof like a broken arm) and water was seeping in. It's nice to have a neighbor who addresses the problem, though, instead of letting the whole thing fall apart. I know it's often a matter of money, but it's also a matter of arresting the problem before it turns catastrophic.
But again, I'm an optimist. I trust in the process (writers lean that way), and right now I'm part of the process of Cole growing and changing. I've heard it said that if you're not frustrated with the goings on around here, then you haven't been the victim of crime (which I have, so...your point?) or, subtext, you've got your head up your arse. Causasians are most often the ones throwing around these (mis)statements.In the end, I'mjust not willing to play the white card, waving it around like some kind of fire stick to keep the "bad" people at bay. I like Latin music, the atmosphere it creates. I love seeing kids (of all colors) playing together outside at dusk, a group of parents watching over them, chatting with one another. I've talked to crack heads, asked them to move along (which they do), smelled the sweet smoke of bad weed wafting over my fence, had innumerable people knock on my door asking for work. I deal. I didn't imagine it would be any different. We are a nation at war; I'm a little more concerned with that and water issues in the West and the millions of kids who will go hungry every night as a result of this recession than I am about the day laborers huffing a fatty in the alley.
What's going to happen in Cole is that change will come, and the people who want this neighborhood to be the next Highlands or Tennyson will get their wish, and make their money when they flip their house (let's face it, most of the naysayers and complainers aren't in this for the long haul) and leave without looking back. Forgotten will be the graffiti that vexed them, the dealers that strolled their sidewalks, the flies that infested their lovely backyard picnics avec chevre and prosecco, the business owners and their dug-in heels. Cole will be like a bad trip these bitter opportunists just had to pass through in order to get to somewhere else.
Several of the neighbors on my block--lifelong Cole residents--with whom I've had conversations regarding the influx of folks (esp. those who seem hell bent on pointing fingers and telling everyone what's wrong with Cole) hope these new people come and go quickly, without much fanfare. If persistent complaining, endless b*tching and the perpetuation of stereotypes are the primary weapons of "gentrification," and people of color are seen as intractable and chided for their supposed intolerance, and (laughably) their reverse racism (as if such a thing can truly exist in America, a country baptized in the blood of slaves and built on a foundation of religious discrimination and intolerance-the Puritans weren't looking to party, after all), then, they conclude,who needs it?
Well, let's be realistic. Gentrification is happening, whether we like it or not. But that's just the brick and mortar piece of the puzzle. The real action - the heart of the matter - lies with the people: How we treat one another, how we shape our ideas of one another without bias (or with a keen awareness of our biases, which are as much a part of us as our eye color), how we use labels as weapons, and spit words that enter the Cole-body politic like shrapnel. Why would any long term resident of Cole want to align his or her self with people whose investment in this area is so obviously self-interested, insular and transparent? Aside from the intellectual dishonesty therein,supporting the put-upon do-gooders (and I use that term loosely) reeks of Machiavellian groupthink. And, for goodness sake,Cole is no Republic, nor are its residents plebs.