The city is a hard edge. Glass and steel. It is all new. I leave it behind. The road turns. The houses are older here. They are wood. The paint is tired. A good tired.
The roads are not straight. They are old asphalt, patched. Uneven. They dip and rise with the land. The sidewalks are cracked. Grass grows up through the lines. The cement has given way to life. It is as it should be.
The trees are dense. They block the sky. Fruit trees. The light is filtered, warm and soft. The porches sag a little. The roofs have moss. Not a fault. A fact. It is all green. The fences have gone to green. The ivy takes over. A wall of life. Uncut. Untamed. You cannot see the line where one yard ends and another begins. It is one green thing.
The neighbors’ yards are full of things. Gnomes and flamingos. A small stone birdbath. Things from the holidays. Never put away. They are faded now. Bleached by the sun. The plastic is brittle. They have endured. Like everything else here. They are not new. They are permanent.
The air is different. Not clean. Full of wet earth and old wood. The smell of the rain on the leaves. The city is about newness. This place is about endurance. The houses stand. They have seen things. A long time. The wood weathers. It is a slow, steady change.
A good afternoon. The sun comes through the leaves. Dappled light on the broken road. The sound of a screen door closing. A sound that has been here forever. There is no constant traffic hum. Just the hum of the quiet. The hum of the crickets. The squirrels chatter. The birds sing in the deep shade. Bees work the flowers. A butterfly drifts.
There is a lake nearby. The water is dark. The ducks drift on it. They know the quiet. They are not in a hurry. They are part of the slowness.
This is what I love. The slowness. The refusal to be neat. The way everything leans in together. It is not perfect. It is real. The city lights are a distant smear on the horizon. I do not need them. I need the sound of crickets at night. The sound of the wind in the big trees.
It is a good place. It has been a good place for a long time. It will be a good place.
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