The entire house, every nook, every corner smells like roasting pork. The sun is pouring through the curtains and early in the morning, he rises up mumbling about needing to put the pig in the oven. I have a foggy memory of yesterday’s purchases; one roasted pork with gandules for us and one to prepare for his friends at work. This is his area, the preparing of the meat and the rotund pots full of gandules (rice and beans) and the plates of thinly sliced tomatoes and the deep fried tostones with the ketchup and mayonnaise sauce. It’s his home away from home and I partake of it gladly.

Early mornings are time to savor rich strands woven into our life’s fabric. I pad around the house, searching out books, pens and a notebook and the slippers which forever elude me upon first seeking. They have a world of their own, these slippers. On occasion, they rest under the couch watching the news or listening to our conversations. Somedays, they wander off to one of the upstairs bathrooms having been tossed aside after the owner’s shower. They hear the neighbors outside, the two little ones playing at being pirates in the backyard, even though the children are small and fragile as blond glass and live as harmlessly as the tiniest white butterflies still flitting around the edges of the windows, after our first frost. They are hopeful creatures, our neighborhood pirates, my slippers and the butterflies.

After the hard freeze of Friday evening, he states with sad conviction, “It’s time to get out the flannel sheets”. The air is brilliantly cold and I slept the deepest sleep in a long while. We relish deep rest which comes from sleeping in cold air. It is difficult to describe but it is delicious. It is security. We doff our caps to outdoor creatures soon seeking similar shelter under woodland covering, bundles of hay, weeping willows and for the smaller creatures, the safety of small rocks, wet and mashed leaves and the fallen log. Covering is woven tightly into my mind and spirit and experience.

One summer when visiting family in Hawaii, I was shown my bed and aside from the fitted sheet, it was bare. I was informed I had no need of any blanket or even a flat sheet. I could not understand it. “Surely I will need at least a flat sheet?” My cousin, having been raised in Michigan, understood my reluctance and in the end, gave me a top sheet which I duly flung aside by early morning. She was right. In that tropical climate, there was no need for covering. I did not need the warmth but all the same, I felt unattached and disconnected. The temperature readings on the weather report were the same, varying perhaps a degree or two for days at a time. I stepped outside the home and saw a variety of creatures clinging elegantly to the stucco walls and I knew that everything was in an upside down world. They sought cover underneath their bodies. I needed it on top of my limbs.

I am sorry to launder and pack away the ocean blue linen sheets. They performed splendidly in the summer. I lay awake and pretended I was in the Caribbean watching lizards on the wall, eating pineapple freshly cut, believing the temperatures would remain the same for the next ten days. Now I have re-committed to flannel. Autumn leaves and branches are woven into the fabric of this bedding and soon the kitchen candles change from pineapple cilantro to pumpkin harvest and homestead apple and another page turns in our book and I will be more savagely on the lookout for errant slippers and a thicker robe.

It is early Monday morning on the last day of September. Before 6am, I sit in absolute silence in the reading room and listen to all the things which are empty. The air outside is black and the warm corner light glows over the edge of the coffee mug and the damp hem of the thick plaid blanket. It rained around 4am and in a few days I will need to start searching around for socks and shoes with closed toes. I see myself going through the tedious process of removing all the plants from the porch and trying to find the best place to put them; a location where they receive maximum waning autumn light.

I look out the window and consider my day. I decide that when the cars move on my street, the moon moves with them. The red tail lights flicker and fade away in the rain. The moon is gone. As I drive in along the edge of the golf course, there are mini ponds set in the fields sporting layers of filtered fog stacked up on top of each other. All around the ponds these layers look like tubes riding up to heaven. I know there are trolls and leprechauns in that air and I keep both hands on the wheel in case my car starts to vanish in the thick fog, or in case a deer leaps out at my vehicle from the swamp side of the street.

The trick in our building is to ride the elevator without other people. I drag my bags through the front doors of the school and keep my eyes straight ahead looking at the entrance to the corner where the elevator travels. A group of people climb in and one waves as if to ask me whether or not I want them to hold the doors. I shake my head and I step back in a waiting posture to avoid crowding on with them. I look left at the wall and read a poster which states boldly, “It’s okay to not know what you are doing”. I like that. I approach the elevator and I listen as it moves up to the third floor, the faint ding of the bell sounds, muffled doors slide and I hear a voice and then I hear the box in the wall make the same trip in reverse. The door opens and I enter alone. I ride up three flights passing the 44 steps on my side of the building. The stairs are divided into 4 sections of 11 steps apiece. On the other side of the building in at least one stairwell, there are still 44 steps but they are divided into a set of 16 steps, 6 steps, and two sets of 11 steps. I don’t like this side. The uneven chunks of numbers is irritating.

One of my seven year old fellow travelers stops by my office. He’s on the lam again. We talk. “People are telling me to do things I just don’t want to do”. I ask about his Dad, who is no longer living with the family. He hops up on the window ledge in the hallway and stretches out like he was on a bed. We talk a bit more. I ask him if he wants to walk me to the bathroom. He says “No”. He waits back in my office with my student teacher while I take a jog down the other hall. When I return, one of the vice-principals is in my office talking to the seven year old about football. I hear a reference to snacks. The two of them strike some sort of a deal and they disappear down the hallway together. I close the open window on the ledge where he has been lying. It’s beginning to rain again.

I do not really eavesdrop but I love a good dialogue. People tell you everything in time. Just listen long enough and deeply enough. People will tell you more than you would ever wish to know. I can’t explain it and I don’t often understand it. It just is. They talk and they talk and in the end it sounds just like the quietest whisper of a driven leaf on a grey chalk day.

It is early Monday morning on the last day of September. Before 6am, I sit in absolute silence in the reading room and listen to all the things which are empty. The air outside is black and the warm corner light glows over the edge of the coffee mug and the damp hem of the thick plaid blanket. It rained around 4am and in a few days I will need to start searching around for socks and shoes with closed toes. I see myself going through the tedious process of removing all the plants from the porch and trying to find the best place to put them; a location where they receive maximum waning autumn light.

I look out the window and consider my day. I decide that when the cars move on my street, the moon moves with them. The red tail lights flicker and fade away in the rain. The moon is gone. As I drive in along the edge of the golf course, there are mini ponds set in the fields sporting layers of filtered fog stacked up on top of each other. All around the ponds these layers look like tubes riding up to heaven. I know there are trolls and leprechauns in that air and I keep both hands on the wheel in case my car starts to vanish in the thick fog, or in case a deer leaps out at my vehicle from the swamp side of the street.

The trick in our building is to ride the elevator without other people. I drag my bags through the front doors of the school and keep my eyes straight ahead looking at the entrance to the corner where the elevator travels. A group of people climb in and one waves as if to ask me whether or not I want them to hold the doors. I shake my head and I step back in a waiting posture to avoid crowding on with them. I look left at the wall and read a poster which states boldly, “It’s okay to not know what you are doing”. I like that. I approach the elevator and I listen as it moves up to the third floor, the faint ding of the bell sounds, muffled doors slide and I hear a voice and then I hear the box in the wall make the same trip in reverse. The door opens and I enter alone. I ride up three flights passing the 44 steps on my side of the building. The stairs are divided into 4 sections of 11 steps apiece. On the other side of the building in at least one stairwell, there are still 44 steps but they are divided into a set of 16 steps, 6 steps, and two sets of 11 steps. I don’t like this side. The uneven chunks of numbers is irritating.

One of my seven year old fellow travelers stops by my office. He’s on the lam again. We talk. “People are telling me to do things I just don’t want to do”. I ask about his Dad, who is no longer living with the family. He hops up on the window ledge in the hallway and stretches out like he was on a bed. We talk a bit more. I ask him if he wants to walk me to the bathroom. He says “No”. He waits back in my office with my student teacher while I take a jog down the other hall. When I return, one of the vice-principals is in my office talking to the seven year old about football. I hear a reference to snacks. The two of them strike some sort of a deal and they disappear down the hallway together. I close the open window on the ledge where he has been lying. It’s beginning to rain again.

I do not really eavesdrop but I love a good dialogue. People tell you everything in time. Just listen long enough and deeply enough. People will tell you more than you would ever wish to know. I can’t explain it and I don’t often understand it. It just is. They talk and they talk and in the end it sounds just like the quietest whisper of a driven leaf on a grey chalk day.

In the autumn of 1969, I entered kindergarten. Five things were true. I wore my hair in two tightly woven braids with matching ribbons. I carried a beige leather purse over my shoulder on a silver colored chain. I rode bus number 36 and my parents mentioned vaguely that my bus driver was ‘rough’. I was terrified of my teacher. There were 50 children in my class.

There were 50 children in my class. There was one, very thin and stringy strongly built custodian who came into our room dutifully day after day and lifted down 50 cots from the high shelves in the cloak room, set them up and again at the end of the day, picked them all up again and re-stacked them on the same shelves. Both of his ears at the tops folded down and back in the wrong direction as if caught in a press at an earlier time in his life. I watched his ears every day and wondered what had gone wrong.

The room was very large. There was a piano and a huge drab looking rug at the end of the space by the windows where we gathered daily to sing. I do not remember a single song learned on that rug. I came from a musical family so there was already plenty of music pouring into my ears at all times both with accompaniment and acapella so I didn’t care too much about the school musical offerings. I was too busy trying to find my allotted space on a rug with 50 children.

We ate lunch in the room and a hot meal cost 25 cents. A carton of milk cost 2 cents. Ice cream appeared on Wednesdays and cost 10 cents. One of the boys seated next to me at the lunch table blew my white paper napkin off the table onto the floor. I did not like him. One of the boys napping next to me in our sea of blue cots, looked over at me one day and promptly vomited under my cot. From a physics standpoint, it was quite a feat since there could not have been more than one inch between our cots and he missed me, but I was not impressed.

There was a boy who smelled like a barnyard and my parents explained there were a number of children in my class who came from families who worked on the land. I understood it better but I still didn’t like it. There was another boy in my class whose cousin sat at my table. He had a Green Hornet coloring book and would not share the book or the crayons with me but he did share them with his cousin. I understood that it was a good thing for families to stick together but I had never had a cousin who was my age or one who attended my school. For me, cousins were family members who had to live at least two states away.

During naptime, all of us were handed gray, itchy wool army blankets that could have come from the Korean War and perhaps further back. My Dad saw them once and remarked he had used a similar blanket during his military service in World War II. There were a couple of students napping among the ocean of gray wool who were lucky enough to have allergies. They were given beautifully colored purple, white and blue striped cotton blankets and they lorded it over the rest of us. I told my parents I wanted an allergy and they told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Out of 50 children, there was one boy who was visited regularly by one of the special education teachers and who eventually disappeared from our ranks having been spirited away to another classroom where there were no more than six students. Those students seemed genuinely happier than the rest of us when our long winding line passed their open door and we all caught a brief peek into another world. There was a whole lot of color happening in that room and the teacher wore open toed sandals and had all her fingernails painted brilliant candy apple red. She wore bright Hawaiian print dresses and a lot of lipstick and her hair was piled high up. After various vague comments about school attire and too much ‘flash’ my parents decided that children who were in special education classes needed a lot of bright colors because it helped stimulate their thinking. It was comfortable having a rationale as to the appropriate use of color in school and on one’s professional person and things settled. There were still 49 students so we hardly missed that one boy.

Kindergarten was sort of a wash and my parents told me later that I could have done without it. I could have told them that. On my report card, my teacher wrote in careful looping handwriting that I acted in a manner which showed that I considered myself to be superior to my classmates. I deny it. The teacher did not like me because I was quiet and that made her suspicious. I was just looking for my space on the drab colored rug with the rest of the herd and was busy wondering where the one boy went who slowly got swept up in the tide leading to the special education room where they all seemed happier.

It is 5:00 o’clock; early beginnings in September. Dawn inches out slowly across the land at the edge of the bending river and the moist soil. These rich fields are filled to bursting with corn and beans and wheat. It has been a long time since I wakened at this hour. This time belongs to the farmer and the road crew and the wind which buffets the heavy equipment, the seed spreader and the faces of those hearty souls who have spent their entire lives breathing in this moment. These are the people who prepare plates thick with home fries, bacon and eggs and hotcakes, waiting to be served up greasy and hot. These are the people who build the land so that others may drive through it.

I cannot eat at this hour. It is enough to be awake and to sip strong coffee grown in the deep green heart of Puerto Rico. I listen to the wind chimes clanging wildly on the porch. The breeze sounds different now. The air blows with its edges all curled up, almost as if it is tucking itself in against the coming frosts. There will be a full moon soon.

Last night, at the stroke of midnight the sky stirred and the old moon sighed and rolled over. It’s a long leaf strewn slope down toward the first frost and the heavy splintered baskets of apples with the metal handles which gouge the flesh on your hands if you don’t carry them well. Then there is the pumpkin harvest and the purple ink black shadows lingering over the road on which I travel as I head into the city. I am awake at this early hour and I am privileged to revel in the early September beauty.

It’s the second week of this new school year. The road opens up before me as the fields merge slowly into traffic and the buildings rise up and the mourning dove sleeps far behind me in the woods I leave behind. For now, the time of reading in fields of gold and lavender are gone. The bend in the road along the edge of the mighty river pulls me away from that endless August breeze, past the greening banks of the Genesee on this September morning.

On the first morning of September, we celebrate with strong coffee, hot bagels with whipped cream cheese and small slices of sticky cinnamon coffee cake, fresh from the bakery up the road. It is grey and overcast with pastry thin layers of fog rising from the road’s edge to the top of the front yard tree’s thick, greening foliage. My husband says, “September is doing exactly what September is supposed to do”. I agree. He is silent for a long time. Then he turns and says to me, “I’m proud of you. You do your job well. You fulfill my life”. This is the only sentiment I need to hear as we enter this new phase I call ‘the tightening of days’.

Others call it the beginning of the new school year. In the halcyon days of summer, all of the days run together, streaming from the lake to the bay and down to the very edge of the large pond behind us. Sunshine cooks the rain, which then heats up and spills out, running off into the tin gutters and onto the plants and then steams up again all over the hiding places in the front yard. In time, we sit out our yearly dry spell declaring we could never live in the south and then someone says out loud what we are all thinking. “What sort of a winter do you think we are going to have this year?” The Farmers’ Almanac is referenced and the amount of fuzz on caterpillars and the number of bees and then we just accept the days as they roll on. It heats up even more and then there comes the pouring rain back off the excess hovering over the lake and we all say that we needed it and aren’t we glad and then I delight in a break from having to water all the plants on the porch which I have been nurturing carefully.

It’s the first of September and I sit next to the open window in the middle of a sunbeam, observing my toes. There is still time to look at painted toes stroking back and forth over the sun warmed rug. The caramel colored carpet is the slightest forerunner of caramel apples, cider, spice. A time comes soon when toes disappear under layers of woolen socks, quickly appearing only for a quick hot soak in the tub, a vigorous towel treatment and then hiding again under the donning of socks, slippers, blankets. Around here, toes hibernate deeply; as deeply as the bear, the field mouse and the unborn fawn.

September the first and now the days no longer blend together. The clock demands more and the fluid ebb and flow of the twenty-four hour cycle stops. The edges of the day are crimped up tightly like an overbaked pie. There are x’s on my calendar and due dates and the week stiffens up into a seven day thing, a living monstrosity, and all of our eyes look to the golden moment which is Friday at two in the afternoon. This is the magic hour for the hard working teachers in our building.

I dreamt badly again last night. He can not understand it. “Why are you having such crazy dreams, girl?” It is what it is and I shrug my shoulders. We teachers dream badly and frantically several weeks before the start of a new year. In my dream, I am informed by an authority figure whose face is jagged, nebulous, undefined, that to be more culturally responsive this year, the daily announcements will be given in an unknown African tribal language. The announcements include the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by our school creed. I perform these announcements every morning at the ungodly hour of seven fifty. I declare that I will participate in no such tomfoolery. Call me culturally unresponsive. I will resign from this job. Then I awaken.

Autumn lies around a very small corner. It is early. I slept with the windows open so at 6:15 I hear the neighbor roll out his garbage bin. The heavy rubber wheels rumble steadily, picking up tiny pieces of stone and tar and the softest discarded grass clippings from yesterday’s mowing. I hear a voice on the street and then silence. I pad downstairs and in a few minutes, I set a mug of steaming coffee on the white ledge of the open living room window. It is chilly and I watch the drift of white, filmy air rolling off the top of the coffee and tumbling back into the room. At 6:30 I hear the faintest tolling of a church bell coming from somewhere through the trees and then a determined bird joining in; clucking in the front yard tree. He sits on a thin branch of this young tree but this is not a tree which produces fruit. I hope that the bird is not expecting anything grand this coming spring. I cling to the waning hours of August. The colder seasons are coming. Already, the sun doesn’t fall as strongly on the wall out front and the leaves of the tree turn slightly upward and curled in the breeze.

What we remember best is what we learned first. I remember riding in the car with my father; no seat belts, open windows, breathing in corn dust from the greening fields. Alone on Route 19, our destination is the old building on Main Street in Fillmore; I still feel the splintered wooden flooring under my bare feet. It is a simpler time. The ancient man managing the store and shuffling behind the counter quietly makes our treats; forever faceless. Dad orders a chocolate coke and I work on a root beer float. He sips carefully, favoring upper gums stitched recently by our town dentist. I wrap my bare legs around the steel stool pole. The store is silent. We are the only customers in there. The building is dying. Even I know this as a four year old because the wood smells so, so old. It splinters my bare feet as we leave the building, the floor cracking and sagging. We ride silently back to Houghton, full of sugar and I hold my right arm out the window, opening my palm against the air, fighting its force and letting my long hair whip wildly. My feet are filthy and I crawl over the hot seat into the back to hide as we come into town. I lie on the floor feeling small pieces of stone and tar grind into my knees. It is a simpler time.

She sighed deeply and closed down the top of her laptop. “With this gesture, I thee dismiss!” She leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms over her head. “What’s that?” asked her husband looking up from the book he was reading. “Who’s being dismissed?” She stared at him fondly, across the room, that man sitting comfortably there with all the books and highlighters. In his free time, he busied himself with reading and learning in such a fierce manner that it was endearing. Except for the highlighter marks which surfaced occasionally on the arms of various couches and chairs. Those weren’t endearing. But he tried so hard, this lovey of hers.

She stretched to the left, counted to three and then again to the right counting again to three. She sighed again. “No one is being dismissed, rather something is being dismissed, shoved aside if you must know. I am dismissing or ignoring rather, any scrap of information concerning the Rochester City School District, at least for the summer”. He gave her a meaningful glance over the top of his glasses. “At least for as long as I can get away with it”, she corrected herself. He nodded and she looked down at her hands. She glanced at the closed laptop. The blue light on the corner of the lid blinked back at her. She had just finished reading an email about a ‘not to be missed’ professional development opportunity for teachers in her school. There were so many times when something was labeled ‘state of the art’, a ‘not to be missed’ experience. Everyone was to be continually entertained, it seemed and the district was no different. “Education is becoming part of the entertainment industry” she stated.

Standing up she said quietly, “I find there is almost nothing which really impresses me anymore”. Her husband looked up again. With a slightly concerned look on his face, he murmured, “surely it can’t be that bad?” She turned away to head into the kitchen and said, “Well, I know that when someone claims that I will ‘love it and will not want to miss it’, I cringe. I do all within my power to ‘miss’ whatever ‘it’ is. I am my father in a thousand ways”. He chuckled and returned to his book while trying to hide a fresh highlighter mark on the chair arm by placing his hand over it.

In the kitchen, she began making iced coffee, starting with grinding spoons of fresh Yaucono beans from Puerto Rico. They were produced in a place called Ponce, a place she had not yet visited. Early on in their marriage, her husband stated once that people from Ponce thought they were something special. “What do you mean?” she had enquired. “Ponce is Ponce and everything else is parking” had been his response. She thought about that statement for quite awhile. Insults did not always translate smoothly between languages and here was a good example. What could be so wrong with parking, after all? Wasn’t parking a sign of civilization and progress? Paved roads were one of the reasons one could travel so smoothly, from town to town. Or perhaps, just perhaps parking in this case meant that others had the right to run one over, not physically of course, but socially or relationally. Most people had at one time or another felt the sting of not being part of the group. Any group could snub another, here on the mainland and even on the beaches of a lovely island.

That Western New York sun, pink and cool, setting quickly below the dark tops of evergreens and sumac, disappeared with greatening speed as we strode along the bike path, picking up the pace while chatting and hoping we would find our way safely back to the car in time. The twinkling lights of the boat docks, the lift bridge and the restaurants lit up one by one, guiding us along the darkened path just in time before it might have become dangerous to continue stumbling along at the canal’s edge. Summer had arrived.

Early days in July brought a delightful breeze and with it the deepest longing to lie abed listening to quiet. The white blinds, speckled with sun and dappled with shade, clicked and clacked in the coolness, lifting just enough to gain singular glimpses of what was going on outside, only to fall back quickly into the role of protecting the open window from neighbors who might be curious. From time to time, even the blinds seemed tired; resting quietly in the morning air. The weather turned on its side as it often did so quickly in Western New York. The week before school let out was thick with humidity and high temperatures and then came a downpour from over the lake and it cooled, and sought the sun again, subsequently reheating everything into a thick soup of hot fog, then cooling down once again. A week of relief ensued and everyone felt better, more sure of themselves in the cooler atmosphere. July promised to be spectacular.

I was on holiday, at long last along with co-workers, friends and close to 30,000 students, most of whom now languished in the hot city. The school year had ended with a whimper on the twenty-sixth of June, wilting up against a halcyon day with billowing galleon clouds against a backdrop of clear, brilliant blue. The excellence of such a day brought with it a sense of hope, a sweeping and clearing of the mind, yearned for even as the pressures inside the school building collected, mounted and spilled over cutting a path of demoralizing lethargy. For by year’s end our school had landed badly, donning the dubious rags of ‘receivership’ status. Morale, already at a low ebb, crashed immediately for good. The game of emotional survival began in earnest as most staff members listened no longer to the threats and general noise coming from the state and the administrators. The year was done.

We grew reluctant to leave our home as summer commenced, spending time instead moving slowly around the furniture, looking out the windows, cleaning out drawers, folding laundry, or curled up in bed with stacks of books and documentaries about historical events long past; we hid in the sanctuary of smaller spaces. The world outside loomed large and full of foolishness and discontent. We had long tired of it all. As I put it one evening, upon reflection about the school year, “Well, we tried this year. We all tried but we ran head on into the system”.

The neighbors are planting palm trees. I look out my living room window and my eyes, sensing that something is amiss, wander over the lawn and down the slight slope on the winding drive and over across the street, and there, coddiwomple from the farthest south corner of our house I see our neighbors bending and digging and sweating and planting one, two, three lovely palm trees along the side of their house.

Coddiwomple is not a common term. It means generally to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination. The neighbors are working very hard, hosing and packing dirt and speaking to each other in their strange language. I do not know from where they come but I do know right at this very minute that the destination of those three lovely palm trees will be anything but vague. We live in Western New York where temperatures are known at times to dip to minus 20 degrees. Has no one told them? The end of those three palm trees will be swift, deadly, permanent.

The first year we lived in this house, I purchased 3 large, beautiful palm trees to have as house plants and during the summertime, to lug to the porch to sway gently in hot July breezes. I married someone from Puerto Rico and since I was raised with hardy pine trees, he planted six of them for me at the corners of our property. I in turn lugged palm trees out to the porch and remarked on their elegance and beauty. “We’ll see” murmured my husband.

In the end, all the lugging and watering and feeding was in vain. Coddiwomple. The palms were loathe to leave the breezes and the heated porch floor. They did not understand that when the land began to change and the air thinned and the leaves started to change from green to copper and pink and orange and red and eggplant, that they too would be required to change. They clung tenaciously to the edges of the white porch railings, stretching with outcurled fronds toward the remnants of August sun and I told them, “Look. It’s all deception, my friends. That brilliant orb, that great big sun up there, which scientists insist is one and the same as the sun hanging gently over the beaches of Puerto Rico, well, it is not. That sun will tease you and freeze you in a very few months. Now let go of the railings”.

I dutifully hauled them in from the porch. I did my best. I watered  and nurtured them carefully and placed them in the sunniest space of the house, but they were not fooled by that wan sunlight, that weak watery white light which lingers for a very few hours each day in the dead of winter.

By February when every last drop of sunshine was as precious as gold and that which did manage to stream through the window for a few hours a day was uncommitted, the truth became evident. That winter sun’s only purpose was to create a sparkly, gaudy diamond display as it touched mounds of snow, blinding the lone neighbor walking along the ice covered sidewalks. It was not sunshine which nourished. It showed up mid mornings, crested over frozen pines and was soon gone.

In March, even though the calendar promised spring, the long suffering palms of summer, took one long last look at the warm kitchen and lit candles and then folded up their withering fronds, hung their heads and passed. They were dragged outside to the garden box by the shed and I spent quite some time brooming up the dried petals lying all over the kitchen and morning room floor.

I step back from the curtain and look at the ceiling and take a deep breath. I think about the neighbors working so hard out there in the hot sun. Has no one told them this may not be a good idea? I have seen this couple walking quietly around our streets and nodding politely to others when greeted with a cheery hello and a wave. I am not sure that they speak English but everyone makes an effort. Generally speaking, this is a happy and polite neighborhood, nothing too loud or off putting. People keep to themselves, occasionally crossing the street to tackle light conversation and then returning quietly home, closing their doors against intrusion and connection. But we do make an attempt, some sort of an effort to interact with neighbors.

Maybe they already know that the plants will not live long. Maybe they are homesick and for a few weeks want to feel that there is something out there growing in their yard which speaks comfort to them, reminding them of lost and old days far behind them, memories to encourage them now as they have journeyed to the land of pine trees and brick garden walls and polite and unconnected conversation and wan sunlight and snow, lots of snow.

Several weeks later we both look out the window down toward the lawn of the neighbors and see that the palm trees are gone. Instead, they are busy building a sturdy looking red brick wall which runs the length of the side of the house. It has two sides and appears to be some sort of a trough which may be used for planting lots of flowers next spring. Someone has spoken to them about the palm trees. Maybe not. Last Sunday evening, as the neighbor who lives behind us  is walking her dog, I ask her about the wall. “I don’t know” she states simply. “I wanted to ask them where they got all those materials, but I don’t think they speak English. I wave to them occasionally and say ‘hello’ but they don’t speak to me or if they do, they repeat anything I say. The other evening when the power was out for a few hours, I asked him if he had any power and he said ‘power’. I tried using the word ‘electricity’ and he repeated that as well. We smiled and separated”. I said to her as she left with her dog, straining on the leash, “I thought maybe”.

In the evening I look back out the window and notice how fast the brick wall is coming along. They are hard working, industrious people, these neighbors of mine. That wall will survive the upcoming winter. I close the curtain and turn away.