A blast furnace surge of wind sweeps over the city on this Friday afternoon. It’s a fruit salad kind of day but it turns out instead to be an iced Coke and salty fries kind of day. Sage green leaves whipping upward in the wind…in and around and between the flapping flags in dappled sunlight and brilliant yellows…there is the slightest hint of rain…hints only and there are miles to roam before that promise.
I sip that frozen Coke and lick that salt off the tips of my fingers and consider the house on East Avenue as I stop from my meandering stroll. It rests heavily a few blocks up the street from the George Eastman house. Buried in pounds of climbing ivy and low hanging trees…matted vegetation and strewn stucco pavers lying behind and around the steps in the front yard where no grass can grow. Trying to glance into the front windows from the edge of the sidewalk, I hope to see anyone, anything. In past days, clearly this huge home was occupied and occupied well. Books lined the walls, the window glass shone and sparkled and once in awhile a lamp was lit…early on a winter’s eve…but now there is never a car, nor a person, nor a newspaper on the stoop…everything remains hidden and buried behind the massive walls of green and the piles of leaves mounting around the base of the big trees…growing in rotten stages…with each passing year…roots bubbling upward and outward, pushing up against the edge of the sidewalk and crumbling toward the edge of the avenue.
One day two springs ago, I saw her. I took an East Avenue afternoon stroll and I finally saw her…long, straggly hair, wearing a long sleeved white shirt, she was seated in the middle of the grass…next to the passing traffic on the heated afternoon…seated in the middle of the grass, bent over with a pair of scissors…cutting small sections of sod.
I kept a wary eye on her, oh yes…as I walked on by…quickly. No attempt at conversation acknowledged…the air around her…thick with caution…and that massive house…wrapped in ivy watching her, watching me as the world passed by on the avenue.
And after that day, I saw her several more times during my walks…always seated in the same spot…in the middle of the grassy median…just inches away from fast traffic…hunched over with a pair of very sharp scissors…chopping at or snipping up sections of yard…as if the claustrophobic ivy had finally broken her…as if she needed to cut her way out and back into the real world which runs along this rapid stretch. Too little, too late and whatever caged her in years ago, kept a grip on her person…for she never looked up…never acknowledged the foot traffic, never lay down the sharp scissors…crouched over so dangerously near that heated thoroughfare in that long sleeved white shirt.
I take a final sip of the iced Coke and look at the house from across the street. The city trucks have rolled in and cut down the ivy with massive shears and dug up the matted moss and raked the tons of rotting leaves, trimmed the trees and bushes and washed down the walls of the stucco mansion…so elegant in its appearance.
The woman with the scissors is no where…perhaps dead, perhaps institutionalized…perhaps hidden away with family…quietly cutting green paper, or straws of grass…safely tucked away from the crumbling edge of the dangerous avenue…
690 Saint Paul 