Concrete cracked in parallel places and repaved over and over and over again, melting down the sloped road onto Knight Street on which pedestrian vehicles and mammoth cargo alike course onward to their garages, their loading bays, each carrying a tune that from here sounds like the ocean when sequestered by a conch and released at the ear. Gradient blue hills and their precipitative toupees washed behind the foreground bungalow as it dries out from disuse, brittle stems the colour of beechwood planning their slow colonization of the doomed lot, ascending with a tactic uninterpretable to foreign kind. Ancient, aching trees cracking their knuckles and sighing to themselves – with age comes not just wisdom but weariness. Spider webs between every vertices. Hedges as organic address markers. Wheezing from idling cars brushed downstream by gusts crawling through iron gates of lavender, soaked wholly by scent and sound when it rolls past and beyond, approaching pear trees and fearful of rose bushes which snarl at any acknowledgement at all. Slowness abound. The passage of time hides under laminated tracing paper stained as weak coffee and bleached where the graphite sunned itself on the lawn, and the history of it feels like common grass beneath bootless, brazen feet. Stay a while, study the neighbourhood, or don’t.
We live in the kind of municipal pocket that seems mostly unconcerned with the people on its streets. Trees are old; roads are imperfect; we in our dwellings have no say on these details. It’s not malevolent, though, this obliviousness towards us. There is a calming stillness that collects when the sun starts to slant out of sight, as if the streets are on their way to bed and are content to know they’ve left things just as they should be. I get the feeling that we come and go just as neighbours decades ago came and went. We’re more like ants poking around a noble root system, or bivalve shrapnel shored up with every lap of a tide. We exist in numbers but are incapable of leaving any trace. Perhaps part of this idea comes from the circumstances of our living here: by surprise, we settled happily into a house so winsome as to be unsettling. Will we be lucky enough to stay another year? There’s almost no question of whether we deserve to be here, because this place doesn’t deal in matters of should. We are below that consideration. Again, not unkindly. I think that’s just inherent to our smallness. We can sit on our porch and look at the decorations of time, the emotions of locus, and feel our own personal surges of joy or wonder or tenderness, but what we’re experiencing has looked into many more eyes than ours and has stood stalwart against all slices of season. It remains; doubtlessly changed in increment ways, but still. It presides and thinks only of its own vector of existence as nightfall blooms fully and the promise of tomorrow is affirmed. It’s humbling, and it’s enticing, and it’s not at all mine to claim but I’ll surely keep note of the deference I offer, unsolicited though it is.