I spray water on the clipped grass tracing the almond tree shadow, preparing a place for my chair, positioning into the evening. The sun is setting, the sky giving up the consistent blue. Traffic has settled. In four hours it might be cool.
The day is everywhere around me. From my backyard I can hear train horns and automobile engines, birds perched on overhead telephone wires, wind filling trees one branch at a time – the whole neighborhood is moving.
To the South the trees create a thirty foot tall grouping, not quite a wall, more like an incomplete hedge, spotty and disproportionate. The orange tree in my neighbor’s yard is limp, dying – soon it might match his dead lawn, grass the color of wheat, an alley still beyond my chain link fence.
I am paused here, the wind chimes for company, the tin-tin jingle of my dogs’ collars in the breezeway, the sound of dry tree limbs rubbing against one another. The garbage men continue to find the can’s missed throughout the day, met by the occasional neighbor dragging the heavy plastic totes up their driveway, over rocks and gardens, behind fences or left out in error.
For the time being I am moved towards a chance to write about personal impasse, the struggle to belong to something bigger than this circle. The phone rarely rings here. I sometimes question my link with the rest of the world at all – especially now that I have become a cripple.
I’m not sure. Where can one go from here?
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