Virginia Schaefer

Sunday Afternoon Stroll With Martha, My Dog My neighbor on Pioneer has mounted her scaffolding again, blasting paint from the scrollwork, muttering about carpenter ants and hornets, a manicured hand patting solid, smooth old wood. Two girls on Prospect, padded at knees and elbows, sock a battered volleyball at one another in the street. “No way was that in bounds.  No way.” A woman in goggles wields a chain saw in her driveway, wrestling loud, large-scale art from hunks of oak. Another buzzes a sander across the spare-tire holder of her Jeep, a neat pile of rust forming on the pavement. On Park, an older woman, tucked under a quilt on one of those quaint Victorian porches (Boston ferns, white wicker, lit candle, actual Persian cat)— even she is pounding away at a laptop computer, smiling at the green liquid crystal screen. A teenager sprawls on the steps of another porch, painting latticework and calling instructions for a math problem to someone inside: “You’ve gotta solve for x before you can solve for y.” Two tiny girls, hammers as big as their forearms, tap Halloween signs into their yard. A tractor driver grimaces under her cap, rumbles downhill, then shoves a stubborn gear into place and misses the tree entirely. On the corner, a woman squints at unruly Westies, balancing her cane to scold with the other hand: “Now I said not to pull, not to pull.” Everywhere ladders, bangings, things being scraped, raked, dragged, chopped, mowed, rearranged with great commotion. Maybe it’s football that has the men indoors, the secret compact of urban Amazons revealed, their power tools gleaming in sharp sunlight. Maybe men raked these piles of leaves to the curbs or planted all these impatiens and marigolds or baked the pie and lasagne you can smell from the sidewalk. I’d like to think so. Martha sniffs each patch of grass for some answer, shrugs and moves on, our feet pulling us home, compelled already to haul out storm windows, fire up the grill, climb on the roof to clear gutters, saw off dead limbs, restack the wood pile, banging each log in the alto of this chorus.

Copyright © 2000 Virginia Schaefer All Rights Reserved