I walked in the rain yesterday. The wet smells of fall were amazingly crisp- the grass, the fallen leaves, the rain on the streets. I walked down the alley ways for a different view. From the alley you can see how people really live. The front is all trimmed and mowed, flowers and such. The back is where you see the junk. The things laying up against people's garages. Old furniture. Boats, campers, trampolines. The firewood, the bikes, the picnic tables and lawn chairs. I get to wondering if they ever sit out there or if they don't find the time. Some have swing sets for the kids. Some sand boxes have weeds, some clothes lines are saggy with lots of use. You can practically see the people and imagine the children playing. Almost smell the fires from the fire pits rising up- but it is raining and everyone is in the house. I am alone, left to imagine the possibilities, the way I like it. The less people I see the more I relax. People might ruin the fantasy of what I have imagined, might shatter the dream of who they are in my mind.
These houses are much like many in America. Put into small city blocks in a small town. I imagine what it was like before TV. Before telephone and radio. People had to actually talk to each other to find companionship. It probably seemed like camping. I can nearly feel the ghosts of what once were, I imagine first the fifties. little girls in white little dresses throwing balls, then the forties with those cars that had ah-oo-gah horns and the boys in those news boy hats. The twenties with the dirt roads muddy in this rain and farther back yet. The horses on the streets, and the smells of all the fires in the stoves making three squares a day. The gossip and the talks on the porches of those ladies in ankle length dresses (how was that practical for cleaning?). Now we live in their houses. Wonder what that is like for them, or if they even bothered to notice?
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