Pleasantdale

The kid across the street and his monotonous dirt bike is edging his next door neighbor toward murder. I've lived here nearly 20 years and have never been in their houses. And they have never been in mine. I talk to exactly one of my neighbors maybe once a month. He's done construction all his life and now he's in his middle 60's with shot hips and knees and just a little left to go on his mortgage. He has to think about winter in a subsistence economy kind of way living on social security. He needs to expand his pile of seasoned cordwood and he prays for a deer in the freezer. 

My car is down with a suspicious tire injury. It's a breezy, sunny Fall afternoon. I have been a sluggard lately. These are the three reasons I walked the mile and a half to the corner store for my morning coffee at 3 pm. On the way there, I decided to order my brunner through the take-out window at the summer restaurant and ice cream place next door to the store. Brunner is the combination meal you eat when you've wasted the day, you've put on weight over the past year, and you're awake to these facts but you're hungry. 

Now I am walking, and it takes a little while before it feels good to do so. I left town last Tuesday for five days and so much has changed since then. Last night was all-my-blankets chilly. The leaves on the maples have turned. The poison ivy on the road's edges is reddening and drying up. I think the hummingbirds have set sail. Just before I left last week I noticed a woman putting a Trump campaign sign out at the end of her driveway with two little girls maybe 5 or 6 years old. It made me wonder what she was trying to teach them by having them there with her. I thought maybe walking by their house today would provide better insight but the sign wasn't there anymore. In fact, for a mile and a half there wasn't a single one. There were, however, a total of two Black Lives Matter signs in that same mile and a half span. Not one actual black person lives there, but the signs are a healthy start. 

There's a green slope off to my right. A former Christmas tree plantation gone to grass. Along the crest I see movement. In the infantry we were warned against skylining ourselves while patrolling or setting up firing positions. No one apparently told the turkeys. I can see their heads randomly bobbing up over the horizon keeping watch. Sniper bait. 

Proximity to wildlife is one of the benefits of living out here. For example, there's what's let of a roadkilled opossum. Just it's naked tail and a flattened hard mat of fir. And a little unmangled chipmunk on it's back in the road on my return trip. It wasn't there on my way out. I like chipmunks and hate to see them killed by speeding idiots in pickup trucks with Trump flags flying in the back. 

I feel like there's lots of things happening that I can't prevent.