That brown fence on the left is “mine”, the outer edge of the place I pay a mortgage on every month. So are the concrete and the rocks and the branches and the falling-apart planter thing.
Down where the trash can is, that’s the neighbor that the cops come to visit all the time, mainly a screechy broken-sounding woman and her broken dogs, every one of them fat in that poor and malnourished way.
Across the alley, which is still a little damp from the storm, there’s another house I lived in for a time, but as a renter and not a so-called owner.
What I’m showing you here though isn’t any of those things, not the fence or the alley or the neighbors, but the strip down the middle of the frame, the no-man’s land between the fence and the alley proper.
The city has a vague opinion on this Gazan strip. They believe that I don’t own it, but that I AM responsible for keeping it clear of trash and weeds and general mess.
For many years I resented this formulation and ignored it willfully, considering it total waste of my valuable time to bother maintaining something I didn’t own. The city tacitly acknowledged my resentment, by sending by a crew once every year or two, a crew of convicts in orange jumpsuits, free labor to clean up a place no one was willing to want or claim.
When I came back here to live, at the height of the summer behind us, it was a total disaster. The weeds were thick and uniformly three feet high, and taller than that in spots. There was a whole bag of someone’s trash buried in the weeds, about where the tree is. It was the outdoor equivalent of a scary room, and worse than that because it was a gnarly problem that belonged to no one. Sort of like capitalism.
In the six months since, I’ve worked on it mostly every day (it’s like the practice of spilling daily, in that way and others).
I can’t really say why I started, or why I kept at it, or why I enjoy the transformation so profoundly, or enjoyed the work involved in transforming. I can’t explain why I don’t resent its existence any more, or why I feel pleasure when I drag my rake over it again and again, or why I feel pleasure looking at it and sharing the view of it with you.
However, I can say that all of it strikes me as deeply metaphorical.
All that exists there at present is nothing, where nothing is defined as a few stray bits of straggly brown frozen grass living on nothing but sunshine and the coffee grounds I fling over the fence every time I come to the bottom of another french-pressed pot.
From time to time I consider replacing the nothing with something, like bamboo, because I heard that bamboo grows fast and easily.
From time to time I also consider replacing wage slavery in my life with a permanent acceptance of pensioner poverty and having no options in my life but to stay right here with a rake in my hand.
See the lilies of the field …
Metaphors.
There’s something right, in the impulse to live inside them.
Probably plenty of wrong too, even in my own eyes sometimes, but not today.
Today as you see it’s another grayish day right before yet another storm.
I’m okay with that, even as I wish for the returning abiding breakout of the full luscious radiant sun.
I’ve posted yesterday’s piece to my substack, and I’ve linked my substack here, in the sidebar to your right.
This post was supposed to be about that, and in some elliptical ineffable way I think it really is.
