Two neighbors

Growing up in my childhood home, we had two sets of retired neighbors on each side of us.

Owen lived with his son to the right and had a mysterious wife who was rarely seen. He also had an inviting crab apple tree blossoming with forbidden fruit I grabbed at carelessly while running through his yard like a feral animal.

All that changed one day when I saw he wasn't in a good mood as he complained to me about “the children around here ruining my tree” while cleaning up a mess of leaves under a branch I skinned off. I didn't know if he knew it was me, but I suddenly realized how my thoughtless actions impacted someone else. He opened my eyes by pricking open my empathy in his garden of Eden, and understanding the grief I caused, never touched the tree again.

One prolific Chicago winter it snowed so much that it made historic headlines across the Midwest. It was also the year I got my first, full-body snowsuit. One day after school I was pretending waist-deep in a drift near the front porch bushes, and Doug, the golf-pants wearing neighbor to the left who loved to travel, popped over with a camera and asked if he could take my picture.

I don't know whatever happened to the snapshot of me grinning with missing teeth as I slid down a snow bank, but I remember the occasion vividly. Interactions with Doug were rare, but I know between his cigars, golf, and travel with his friendly wife Mary, he was enjoying life to the full. Often, when Doug was away during the winter months, Owen would snow blow the whole length of the sidewalk in front of our three houses. He was doing Doug the favor, but we benefited for being "on the way."

When I arrived in this world, both Owen and Doug were in the winter of their lives. I was too young to understand what a lifetime like theirs meant and mostly saw them as they were coming and going and occasionally doing yard work. We moved away from my childhood home when I was 14 and through the years I learned that both Owen and Doug finished their earthly course.

I travel back to the childhood vision of my good neighbors frequently. Owen taught me the value of respecting other people's boundaries and I still dream about Doug's big back yard bordered by soft, plastic green chain-link fence so flimsy it was hard to climb to retrieve the stray kick balls that landed in his yard. I climb into my memories to remember my childhood home representing wondrous optimism when my whole future was still ahead of me and life was carefree and full of days of suiting up to play in the snow.

These days I’m the neighbor living next to a house with two young siblings in college. Katey's mother was pregnant when we first moved into the neighborhood and Landon joined the family two years later. I measure their growth spurts in winters, remembering when helping hands with tiny shovels appeared to "help" Ms. Chris shovel her driveway. Yes, I quietly watched toddlers grow into children throwing crab apples at the side of our house, into teenagers with squeaking voices, and soon into the adults who will plant their own families.

And then they will become the neighbors on the left or right.

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Today counts

Where did you emerge in the stream of time?

In the human timeline of events.

Why now instead of before?

Or did you return?

Why now and not the future?

Or will you be there, too?

Humans measure life in calendars.

And create narratives in events.

But the sun simply shines.

We strive for milestones and accomplishments.

As the moon beams.

And the tides fall.

Night becomes day.

Winter thaws into Spring.

Birds sing a new day into being.

We rise with sleep in our eyes.

And begin again.

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PUN-ish

Math grave

The place where subtracted, reduced, and rounded numbers end up.

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