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October 28, 2019
Effectively Elena
Farmhouse in the middle of town
By Elena Tucker
Special to the Prophet
I thought I was back on the West Coast when I went out for my walk this morning. It was misting and refrigerator-cool, just wet enough to make me glad for my contacts; the spray was like an eau-de-cologne on my skin. It smelled that good outside.
I leave as the bus is picking up the youngest teenager who is not happy about the early hour outside in the dawn. She’s accustomed to the more relaxed schedule of another time zone. Before we moved to the Hill Country, the rush to leave the house didn’t start until well after Scooby-Do was over because her former schools didn’t start until nine o’clock. We still haven’t figured out exactly what the hurry is all about. It is just fractions, after all, and verbs and peninsulas and dioramas and salami sandwiches and poster board projects.
So I leave my daughter standing forlornly in the gray light, and I head off, cutting through the park, slightly uphill, feeling the pleasant pull of my shin muscles, stepping smartly to the rhythmic pulse of Main Street traffic; too many unfortunates heading off to work. I, however, soon head down a side street into another century. Of course I realize that it doesn’t take too much backtracking to reach the century past, but when I walk this block Louisa May Alcott seems to fall into step beside me. I slow way down.
I come to a smallish house with a garage that would be more suitable for a buggy than for the sports car that snuggles there. The lot is huge and well-kept, but not too much. It’s kind of overgrown and cultivated, tidy and neglected all at the same time. The birds are going berserk. They know how good they’ve got it and they don’t mind telling the world. A picket fence whistles nostalgia as I walk beside it and there’s a garden so wonderfully tilled as to assure abundance and color and harvest much later in the year.
The property stretches deep, back into the heart of the block, as mysterious as any vast acreage in the country, begging to be explored. Some day I’ll be unable to resist; the soft pop-bottle whoo of the doves will pull me by my imagination back into a small slice of before. This land still belongs to a distant relation of the Breadwinner. I feel somehow like it’s a piece of me. I can feel the prick of the thorny weeds and smell the wild apples that will grown unnoticed along a back fence. I feel the tickle of its dandelions up my nose and I imagine myself hanging cotton shirts to dry on the clothesline; I run fingers through the smooth soil of the garden and bite into the weedy, fragrance of its summer tomatoes. Mist covers each leaf and blade and I smell Spring things growing. The old barn in the back remembers each boot to ever press a mark into the grasses. It watches over the property like a loving guardian.
I walk down this block every morning. And every morning it’s different. But still the same. It’s familiar and yet so far from the immediate. It’s anything but West Coast. It’s old tyme. Soft and easy. Sweet and sad. Old and forever pristine.
A place and era where I wouldn’t mind spending a lifetime or two.
I leave as the bus is picking up the youngest teenager who is not happy about the early hour outside in the dawn. She’s accustomed to the more relaxed schedule of another time zone. Before we moved to the Hill Country, the rush to leave the house didn’t start until well after Scooby-Do was over because her former schools didn’t start until nine o’clock. We still haven’t figured out exactly what the hurry is all about. It is just fractions, after all, and verbs and peninsulas and dioramas and salami sandwiches and poster board projects.
So I leave my daughter standing forlornly in the gray light, and I head off, cutting through the park, slightly uphill, feeling the pleasant pull of my shin muscles, stepping smartly to the rhythmic pulse of Main Street traffic; too many unfortunates heading off to work. I, however, soon head down a side street into another century. Of course I realize that it doesn’t take too much backtracking to reach the century past, but when I walk this block Louisa May Alcott seems to fall into step beside me. I slow way down.
I come to a smallish house with a garage that would be more suitable for a buggy than for the sports car that snuggles there. The lot is huge and well-kept, but not too much. It’s kind of overgrown and cultivated, tidy and neglected all at the same time. The birds are going berserk. They know how good they’ve got it and they don’t mind telling the world. A picket fence whistles nostalgia as I walk beside it and there’s a garden so wonderfully tilled as to assure abundance and color and harvest much later in the year.
The property stretches deep, back into the heart of the block, as mysterious as any vast acreage in the country, begging to be explored. Some day I’ll be unable to resist; the soft pop-bottle whoo of the doves will pull me by my imagination back into a small slice of before. This land still belongs to a distant relation of the Breadwinner. I feel somehow like it’s a piece of me. I can feel the prick of the thorny weeds and smell the wild apples that will grown unnoticed along a back fence. I feel the tickle of its dandelions up my nose and I imagine myself hanging cotton shirts to dry on the clothesline; I run fingers through the smooth soil of the garden and bite into the weedy, fragrance of its summer tomatoes. Mist covers each leaf and blade and I smell Spring things growing. The old barn in the back remembers each boot to ever press a mark into the grasses. It watches over the property like a loving guardian.
I walk down this block every morning. And every morning it’s different. But still the same. It’s familiar and yet so far from the immediate. It’s anything but West Coast. It’s old tyme. Soft and easy. Sweet and sad. Old and forever pristine.
A place and era where I wouldn’t mind spending a lifetime or two.