The smell of the Mimosa Tree filled the air. On hot dry days walking home, I would come around the last bend, and step onto my block. Even in the dark, I knew this spot. But on hot dry days, this spot was an oasis. The shade from the tree's thick canopy was like a welcoming gesture. As if the tree it's self was saying "Now you get on home little Missy. Your mama will be worryin' about you." Like the tree was greeting me, embracing me with it's cool shade and thick heady scent, and then swiftly sending me on my way home to Victor Drive. I will miss this tree. I will miss walking under it.
Like I miss the little girls who used to live behind my house in the old farmhouse on Elliott which was torn down by the JC to make room for a vacant lot for their building supplies and forklifts. I don't remember those girls names. But I do remember how they would set up a little card table there on the corner, catching the traffic of students coming and going to class. Selling them ice cold glasses of sweet pink lemonade. I will miss those girls, that house, this tree, and this corner. But most of all, I will miss home.
It's time to move on though. The neighborhood's changing. Even if I could stay, I'm not sure I'd want to at this point. Millie's gone and now all that's left across the street is her creepy son who stares at me from behind her lacy old lady curtains. I'm glad he's stopped trying to talk with me.
Hugh next door passed away. And it's hard to get used to these changes. I'm used to seeing him outside, casting his fly fishing lines. Practicing in the street. Or even feeding those damn pigeons! We had so many pigeons in our neighborhood. He lured them in by feeding them. But it made him happy, and that made me happy to see; so in that way, it made this world -and more specifically, my neighborhood a better place to be. He's gone now.
When I look out my back window, across the deck and into the garden, I see the roses that we planted together. But the tall ancient mission olive tree is gone. It's feathery silver branches would dance in the wind and hypnotize me at night. The glow from the moon light suited it. And the big old fig tree, with the canopy as big as any I'd ever seen, was gone too.
The Kawase's on the corner were the last ones to have a cedar shingled roof. We were the 2nd to last. On mornings after a big storm, people wouldn't know weather to return the shingle tiles to them or to us because nobody knew who's roof it had fallen off of. But people cared. They cared enough to at least *try* to return the wayward shingle to it's rightful owner.
I would say Hugh's widow Dora, and her daughter and grandchildren...and the Kawase's on the corner, and the Saneholtz's across the way that bought old Mrs. Rheinie's house are all that's left of this old dying neighborhood. Well...them and me. But I'm leaving soon. And when I go, this neighborhood will die just a little bit more.
It's changing. I'm not sure what it's turning into. But it's not the same place. There's no friendly Irish pub within walking distance, where you can go for Shepard's Pie and a berry Trifle desert. No more ice-cold rootbeer floats from the old A&W or the hot and slimy chili cheese fries that we would munch on. I don't see people as much. There's no more connection between the neighbors. More and more, we're distant, and fundamentally strangers to one another; and that's not the way it used to be. No.
Taking it's place is the ever growing noise. The noise pollution from the freeway that seems to actually grow every year, as more and more people move to this area, or drive instead of walk or ride their bikes. The obnoxious "Beep Beep Beep" of the trucks and forklifts that come into the empty lot behind my house, flashing their orange rotating lights like a cop car's into my bedroom window and waking me up, not with the sounds of nature, not with the mockingbird's song, or even the crow's harsh call, but with the sounds of construction and moving and banging and dropping and of course that beeping that says "Hey...I'm backing this little piece of shit forklift up, I thought you'd want to know that, since it's 5 O'clock in the morning and all..." Yeah. I won't miss that.
I also won't miss the jerk with the convertible BMW roadster who bought his house cheap a couple of years ago, just in time to be here for the end of my mom's life, but not in time enough to really get a feel for who she was, or what kind of people *we* are. We are not bad people. And honestly, our roots here go deep. So it surprised me when this relative newcomer to our neighborhood gave my mom these cold alien looks. Tight jawed. Unfriendly. Unwelcoming. As if to say "You are not wanted here." My mom as sweet as she was, was oblivious to him -and for that, I am grateful. She would always wave and smile at him and greet him like a friend. It perplexed her why he never said anything back. "He must not have heard me." she would say. "Yes, he must not have heard you." I'd repeat, all the while feeling tightness in my chest. This pain, that I couldn't possibly let out. She and I would go for slow shuffling walks around the block. We took our time. She was constantly learning to walk again in those days. So we went, one slow step at a time around our small block. In front of his house, we would make our slow progression, taking 5 or 10 minutes just to go across his tiny front yard. I don't know what he thought of us? It was obvious that my mom wasn't well. And from her crazy unkempt hair, and MY crazy unkempt hair, that we probably didn't see the world in quite the same way that he did. I think he may have even thought we were a slow moving parade of vagrants who wandered out from the homeless shelter around the corner at the Armory. He regarded us like that. But our house was not always the dingy shell that it is today. Years of slaving and struggling and trying desperately to make happy the one true treasure and joy in my life...trying to keep her just a little bit longer...and trying to keep everything going all at the same time was hard. So I stopped watering the flowers in the front yard. I didn't care if my trash can was out on Thursday, even though garbage night came and went on Monday. I was tired, and just trying to hold on. But these people didn't know me. Didn't know my mom. Never saw the house in it's glory years when my grandparents called it home. Never knew what a tight ship they ran. Or how friendly and nice we all are. No. To them, I was the scourge. Something to get rid of. When was I finally going to be gone so someone "nice" could move in? And by nice, they meant really more like them. Someone who would fix the place up and landscape it like it was out of a Sunset magazine. I wanted to. I tried when my mom was alive.
We used to have rows of lavender lining our front walkway. And rosemary planted by the curb. The sweet scent of mockorange greeted you at our front door. I dug out the rosemary and lavender after they had grown dry and straggly from several seasons of fending for themselves. I let the two large pine trees that I planted with my Grandpa be all the landscaping we needed in the front. The pine needles carpeted the ground below, and after the rains, thick rings of mushrooms would poke up from under them. "Fairy rings". -That's what my mom called them. And I think that some part of her, may have actually believed in fairies. May have actually thought of this place, our home, as being a special and sacred place for fairies to come and go. To enter into the world of the everyday. My mother was always a small person. Some friends even called her Vivalina. Like Thumbalina. She even had litte elvish points in her ears. I used to kid her and joke, that I knew the truth about her. But that I would keep her secrets safe and protect the magical entrance to her kingdom.
No...these people didn't know who we were. So when they left a big shopping cart filled with clods of dirt and old sod that they had pulled up from their old landscaping (to be replaced with the beautiful wooden walkway and the wabi-sabi landscape) well...when they left that in front of my house kind of like a passive-aggressive "fuck you" how could I get mad at them? They didn't know who I was. Didn't know that inside of my house was a sick woman, who lay dying, and that when they finally left that cart, she had just died. They didn't know that even though to them getting rid of that heavy shopping cart full of dirt would be just a minor nuisance, to me...it became the chore that never got done because I had better things to do. More important things to do than to deal with their crap, or even attempt to try to talk to them after that. They didn't know. I'm sure they're nice people. Under better circumstances, we might have actually been friendly. Maybe not "friends". ...most of my friends don't do things like that, even to people that they think are assholes who deserve it. Well...I tell you...I won't miss them. Not one bit.
This neighborhood has a life force. And whatever it was from my childhood is dying all around me. And the weeds that are popping up are people like the Sunset garden home two doors down. So it's time to let the wind blow through me, and clear this whole place out. Most of the things that I will miss about this place, are already gone.
