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Small Town Roads

By L B Johnson

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Isaiah 22:23: I will drive him like a peg into a firm place; he will become a seat of honor for the house of his father.

Summer is in full bloom as a silver-haired woman stands upon her porch in this small town and thinks upon a verse from the book of Isaiah. The driveway is glistening from a recent rain shower, as brief as it was warm, the cement assuming a patina that is mirrored by the hand-plastered walls of her home. Sunlight strikes the trellis in a dazzling splash and then darts over the colorful flowers that stand at quick attention waiting for the sun’s acknowledgment. On the porch, a white muzzled retriever sleeps beside her, lulled by a gentle breeze as a solitary car drives by, almost in silence, as if respecting this peaceful time. The silver-haired woman has no desire right now to disturb her faithful companion, her joints tired and aching with arthritis, even as she admires the muscular definition of her arms, still strong from working in the earth.

She’s lived here for what seems a lifetime, staying after her husband passed too early at age sixty-one, a lifetime of smoking taking him too soon. She has no desire to move closer to the big city, no interest in downsizing. Her niece and her nephews will take care of the house when she is gone, she and her husband not having been blessed with children of their own. All she has asked of them is that they leave the flowerbeds as they are, so the cycle of flowers continues long after she is part of the earth.

Each year the flowers return, whether the winter embraces them or neglects them, making a statement of endurance too abundant for the limits of human speech. Then, on one of these lazy weekends, she takes to the planting beds, removing weeds. By the evening the lawn is gaudy with the dead and the dying detritus of a past year. Along with the expired shoots of the previous year would be the errant plastic-wrapped flyer or empty soda can, tossed with a careless hand only to reappear with that first shout of warmth, released from the cold and the dark only to be resigned to it again, there in the recycling bin.

It’s a tradition and a cycle, these little rituals of tending to her home, there in those days where doors still stand closed in the morning chill, the flash of a fire’s hearth only a forgotten gleam on the window. As the flowers come out and grass is cut for the first time, other things emerge from the neighborhood. Small toys and bikes show up in yards as if left there in the night by some spaceship from another planet. Flags are carefully hung; down the street, a clothesline goes up.

The neighbors’ yards here in this small town are much the same, even the overgrown house at the end of the street. The homeowner and the town council are in a permanent state of impasse as to who really has to mow the corner, dotted with colorful wildflowers splashed on the ground as if flung up by the spray of water a passing car would create. There’s an old mailbox in the shape of an old car and several statues of Mary, mother of Jesus, looking at the grass with eyes that are either laying a blessing upon the land or providing a gentle rebuke to a yard gnome that looks on from another flowerbed.

She goes outside and grabs the mail, noting the envelopes that say “valued resident” and not Evelyn Ahlgren, tossing them in the trash.

She watches the new owner of the home across the street arrive, a young woman with strawberry-blond hair. She remembers her as the niece of Ruby, the lovely lady who lived there and who passed away a short while ago, and hoped she would stay rather than sell it or rent it. They met briefly when the young lady lived with Ruby the summer after her parents both passed before she left for college up in Chicago. Living in a town of a couple of thousand people couldn’t be too exciting for a young person after the bustling adventure of school and the sights found in the city. The young woman seems intent on just getting her truck through the very narrow street and does not notice her. Evelyn lifts a weathered hand and gives the young woman a friendly wave, one that startles a bird perched on a shrub as its sharp, tiny cries fall away like flung confetti.

As she turns back toward the house to brew tea, she realizes she has watched these flowers come up for over forty years. She planted some of them as a young bride with others added by her friend Ruby. They still maintain that innocent picture of color and brightness that she has looked at through years of weariness and years of joy, a picture that on the threshold of her final years she sees no means to alter. God willing, she will be here after that ancient trellis has fallen to ashes; she has no desire to spend her end days in assisted living with a tiny cement patio and a garden beyond that is so ordered and sterile that there is no room in it for human curiosity.

She hopes that she will enjoy these blooms until they fade one last time—her bedroom window open to the garden, taking in her final breaths as the infinite air calls in the calming scent of blossoms.

As the sound of her new neighbor’s vehicle fades into the distance, she is simply going to sit and enjoy some tea on the porch, looking at her bounty of blooms on this first Friday of the month. She hopes that she is here at this time next year and the year after, living fixed in the monotonous repetition of the flowers, the garden’s living symbol of hope.

* * *

Evelyn watches her new neighbor as a U-Haul truck and another vehicle full of young people pull up to her long-time neighbor’s house. “Good,” she says out loud. “She’s going to live in Ruby’s house.” She notices such things, especially as they involve old vacant houses, bearing the form of the formerly beautiful. She notices such places in the country: old empty barns, the houses of which watched over them, also long abandoned. The barns always caught her eye, some mystery there in their silent lofts, where among the beams and rough-hewn boards, life from venerable times was lived according to venerable ways, never to be seen again.

There are many reasons such places are abandoned—foreclosure and death the main ones—yet they remain vacant and fallow, someone’s dreams perhaps tied up in probate or simply discarded, no one wishing to assume the burden of that which will take some care to make whole. She only stops to look at such places. Then, she drives down the road to her home, an older place kept in meticulous repair. The house is warm, the walls adorned with only a few photos of the past.

This morning, as she went out to water her flowers, outside the small rental home two doors down, which had been vacated last week, there were a couple of neat bags of trash. Lying next to them were two large pieces of cast-iron cookware. She takes a closer look; both were high-end brands, neither purchased cheaply. Both looked unused but had thick rust covering them. She picks them up and takes them home to examine and clean since they have obviously been left and the owners would not be returning for them. Once the rust is removed, the pans oiled and properly seasoned, they will look as if new and will last a lifetime. Someone simply did not know how to care for what they had and had casually discarded them. She shakes her head at how little this new generation seems to know and hopes her old friend’s niece is more level-headed.

As she watches the young people carrying the boxes into Ruby’s old home, she thinks back to her life in this small town and recalls all of the things that happen here that go unseen or, at the very least, unspoken.

Out at the rural airfield, a man who still wears his youth in his eyes arrives for a local flight. He notices, off in the distance, tires flat, grass growing up into the wheel pants, an old tailwheel airplane sitting desolate. The paint hasn’t seen a wash or polish in years; the once-bright hues that flaunted their color against the sky like a cry of a challenge now lying mute upon the grass. The engine that once fired up with life, growing louder and louder as the entire aircraft trembled like a racehorse waiting to run, lay quiet but for the rustle of birds who have built a nest in the intake. He wonders what it would cost to buy it, to get it flying again.

So many things go unnoticed until they are gone. Some lie barren, covered in days until they no longer shine, forgotten. Other things capture the eye of someone, be it a house, a piece of machinery, or an entire manner of living, which for that person possesses a life all of its own as it lives once more in their care. It is that missing piece of history, that forbidden apple whose taste could open up the pathway to heaven or cast one from all that is paradise. Yet they could not resist taking the challenge, like partaking of the fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden, such things being fraught with the possibility of the undiscovered.

An elderly man sits alone in a house that still shows the remains of the recent past among the modern updates, the 70s retro hunters’ blaze of orange touching some things like a flame, shag carpeting stamped flat by the trails of children past. It is quiet now, his wife and his only son preceding him in death. The TV is off, the windows open, the curtains breathing in and out with the soft exhalation of the evening. It is a night for memories or passages, those moments within us that by our history and remembrances release us from the shadows, our soul freed there in that one moment that makes certain silences clearer than any words that could be uttered.

In another home, one that’s seen several generations come and go, a young man in a blue button-down shirt sits in a chair, surrounded by books and antiques. Each piece was carefully picked from the flotsam and jetsam of estate sales, carefully cleaned and placed in the room using only muscle and sweat. The safe, hidden in another room, holds a small collection of rare and unique firearms, some dating back to the Civil War.

Some people are born out of their due place, fate casting them too soon or too late, but they only look ahead, even as they bear a yearning for a place they knew not. On the shelf is a picture of an older woman with young eyes that look just like his. He looks at the photo, tracing the leather of the spine of a book, with hands that remember.

Across from Evelyn’s house, a strawberry-blond-haired woman works in her basement, putting boxes away from the moisture, water having crept in during recent storms. In watching her work, you would think her to be a young girl. Only in the harsh light from the window do you know she is a young woman. She looks down at her hands and her forearms, the scar on her palm where she took a fall out of a tree, and the rough-edged dimple on her arm, where bone forced its way through when her first childhood experiment with gravity went awry.

There are other scars you could not see; the loss of her parents and a brother, but she foraged on, hoping to find something in this small home she inherited from her aunt, a place that holds memories visible only to her. She will not cry, even though she doesn’t know a single person here. No, she’s descended from immigrants and warriors; for her, life is simply a battle fought, the scars simply marking the skirmishes won.

She is moving some boxes and hanging bags, military uniforms, and gear, worn by grandfathers and beyond, men who are now only dust and remembered for their courage. There is a new box to add to these, for which she must make room. She opens the box, carefully packed up just a week ago to be moved; the uniform items carefully shrouded and laid to rest within. She touches them gently, and even in their stillness comes a moment of real and profound intimacy with the one who once wore them, unexpected and lasting, as is often our glimpse of truth. They will be carefully packed again to protect them and stored with those uniforms of generations past.

At the bottom of one box, carefully enclosed in bubble wrap, is a single toy soldier that had been unearthed in the garden one spring, years after the battle for world dominion with two children and their troops had ceased. The touch of its small battered form brought back the scent of the earth in their back yard, the shade of the apple tree that sheltered them, the warmth of the sun, times when she could ask Mom and Dad almost anything, and they’d tell her the truth.

Was this little figurine simply a forgotten toy or was he buried in some forgotten childhood military honor? She could not remember, but like anything long lost, he spoke to her of the reasons why we remember things and why they are important.

With the lessons of the past, we could live safer and smarter. We could make decisions based on what we learned the hard way, about the truth, about individuals, about intentions, those deceits, and traps that lay like spider webs for the naive or the unwary.

So she continues to look, sometimes seeing the past in front of her, in pieces found years after they were laid there, the answers beneath her hands under a mantle of dirt and time. She sees them sometimes late at night, out of the corner of her eye. Perhaps it’s just fatigue, perhaps an awareness of more than these moments here and now but there, at the edge of her vision, she senses those moving moments of lives that went before. People who valued freedom over power, truth over political correctness, people unafraid to ask “why” or “how.” People just like her, full of fear and pride and arrogance, courage and love, the knowledge of suffering, and foreshadowing of their death. They had been saying no to death for generation after generation, knowing that they could not stop it but damned if they won’t go out fighting.

She sometimes looks into unseeing eyes, wondering if at that moment of their passing, the questions were answered, or if perhaps more compassionately, they had forgotten the asking of them. All that remains are scent and whispers there in that cold landscape, speaking and murmuring across time the questions they could no longer seek that she could give voice to with a simple but solemn signature at the bottom of an evidence document.

The items put away; she returns to a table covered with her dad’s old tools, a place to work and repair, to form and craft. For, like her father, she finds something soothing in fixing and finding answers in that which was broken, even as she restores its use. Perhaps that’s why after majoring in criminal justice she took a position as a police officer in this small town in which her aunt had left her a home, rather than seeking a forensic position in some big-city laboratory somewhere. Officer Rachel Raines. It had a nice ring to it.

Down the road, a young man in a button-down shirt picks up an old violin worth more than all of his other possessions combined, even though its appearance might label it in unknowing eyes as yard sale material. The notes reach out to the depths of the dwelling, penetrating the darkness, laden with the awe and enigma that could be borne on the strings of remembering men. From the shadows inside her basement, she hears the plaintive sound and smiles.

These people may all be strangers, or they may be bound by blood, bond, or friendship. They do share one thing: an understanding that life bears with it the remnants of the past. They could call it baggage or call it wisdom. They could cover it, shed it, walk away from it, forget it ever happened, and forget its lessons, but as they destroy that history, they destroy themselves.

Better they should preserve it for what it was—those moments, those things that made them what they are. They could treat it all as something shameful, or they could speak or write of it in a tone that would be a shout of triumph were the words on a keyboard capable of speech. They could live their lives, old before their time, for the burden of the past, or they could live sufficient and complete, desiring as the young do not to be bound but only to love, query, and scrutinize uncontested, left alone with their freedoms.

It is the future. It is the past. It is life in a small town.

As the vehicles across the street leave and lights come on upstairs in the long dark house, Evelyn sits in a chair, surrounded by books and antiques. The room has not changed since her husband died. On the shelf is a picture of a flame-haired woman and a handsome man. She slowly rises and walks toward it, joints stiff with pain, her form cleaving the space he once passed through. She passes a shelf, a book bound in leather, an old revolver, and a small vase, her glance touching what his eyes had lost. She picks up the photo and realizes that some things, even if not present, are never truly gone, fixed and held in the annealing ash that is our history.

As the night descends upon her unchecked, she stands and looks hard at everything.

***

Evelyn was up earlier than most people even though she’d been retired from her teaching position for three years. As the coffee pot came to life, she looks out on the faint bloom of trees outside the antique lace curtains, the tall branches of the oldest trees standing guard over tender young blooms, watching like sentient parents.

She sits behind an antique teacher’s desk, in a heavy swivel roller chair that’s easier on her old back than the kind she used when she was a teacher. On the desk are pencils and a brand-new laptop she is learning to use. Also on the desk are a coffee cup and some slightly crinkled papers that represented need and passion and the losses that sometimes had to be printed and held in hand to be fully understood, at least to her insurance company. In those papers somewhere was the truth, surrounded by verbiage, encompassed and encased by it. If she just stopped and let the words break free as the planet made just one more rotation, the truth would tumble from within like a shiny gem.

Then there is the house down the street that still sat dark.

The For Sale sign is still up, the yard tidy, the windows reflecting only that which is outside, nothing internal or intimate.

She just found that rather sad. The neighborhood was a stable one, the houses built many generations ago. In the last ten years, she had only seen one family move in on her block, outside of one rental home. That was due to a young couple taking advantage of a better job closer to parents in the state they were originally from and putting their home up for sale.

On the shelf next to her Bible is a rather old-fashioned but sturdy vase that had been her neighbor Ruby’s. She’d bought it at a garage sale before Ruby died, as it matched the color of her wallpaper perfectly. She wondered if Ruby’s house still had much in the way of furnishings in it. It didn’t look like the young lady moving in had much furniture at all, and some of the original furnishings were sold when Ruby fell and then went into nursing care.

Outside of those two events, there’s little change in the neighborhood. There are yellow ribbons tied to all of the trees at one home by the church where no movement is detected. The yard is occasionally mowed as the ribbons fade more and more each year, to where they look like tattered flags. There’s a story there, one that would likely cut the heart like a knife. So many untold tales in these old homes of times and events that people met with either fear or courage; those times that try like stiffness and soreness of muscle or bone that some get so used to that they no longer notice the pain.

Such is life in a small neighborhood. The houses endure, as they have for multiple generations and will for generations more. People have losses and new lives, but there remains under these ancient trees a sense of continuity Evelyn would never get in the more modern subdivisions. With her husband’s pension and insurance she could have sold this place and gotten a newer condo in a big city, but she chose not to. She prefers the stillness and the quiet of history while off in the distance cars rush on in a hurry. She read somewhere that all we have is time. It is true; this is the time between now and the death that we fear. People rush toward it, inventing new ways to do everything faster and easier, so that what time we have goes by in even more of a hurry until the clock suddenly chimes out our name.

A car pulls up, and the realtor meets a young man looking at the house for sale. She hopes it sells soon; seeing two dark houses on the street recently has been depressing.

Over at Ruby’s, the downstairs of the house lies in darkness as upstairs the bright light from two small windows suddenly shines with the resilient hope of a lighthouse in a storm. She bets Ruby’s niece makes that her office, as Ruby did, to better see all the flowers and trees from up there. Tomorrow she’s going to fill that antique vase up with flowers and take it over to the young lady—Rachel, she thinks her name is—as she welcomes her to the community.

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