Place 2.1

The weather has been weird this week. It went up to somewhere in the 60s earlier, and we had thunderstorms. In January. It's a little much to handle. Where's my snow?

We've also had big wind. As I was walking Sadie around the block, I saw a tree that finally had lost all of its leaves. There were three bird's nests in it. Two looked fairly normal, but one had been built at an angle on some of the more thin branches, and I was amazed that it was still up and in one piece. I saw a stick or two hanging down, but it was still there, and wedged quite nicely between two branches.

Place #2

Orion has been hidden for most of this week, although each time I go out at night, I've been looking for him. It's been cold, too, so the stoves are going. Walking Sadie each night, I get whiffs of fireplaces, and I want to go home. The smokey smells reminds me of Hampton, and I miss it terribly.

There was a stray dog out today. Sadie and I left (for a break from writing, for me, and some attention, for her) and started walking, down toward the abandoned house. Coming toward us was a husky; he was on the sidewalk, walking as though on a leash, but completely alone. Sadie has the instincts of an attack dog and the constitution of a china plate, so I pulled her up to a stop. The husky saw us, and stopped too. We were about 100 yards away from each other. The dog cocked his head. Sadie and I turned around. So did the husky.

I looked back a few times, to see if the dog was tearing toward us. He was not. He looked back once or twice, but mostly kept walking, down the side walk, as though he just popped out for an afternoon stroll as well. Sadie and I ducked inside for a few minutes, and then we went back out. The dog was nowhere to be seen.

I wasn't sure what I was supposed to have done. I am afraid of dogs (my cousin was attacked by one when we were all little), and I'd never seen this one before. What if it got scared and bit me?And what about Sadie? A few months ago, a pitbull-like dog was chained to a cinder block outside its house, and when M., Sadie, Daisy, and I walked by, it actually dragged the thing behind itself, following us. Sadie was snarling at it, barking, egging it on. She has no fear of being broken, unlike me.

But what if the dog was lost? Sadie and I walked further this time, more towards the apartments, and I saw it, running around by some trees, and then again, darting between parked cars. It still kept to the sidewalk, and certainly didn't seem wild.

Prompt Post #1

For most of my younger years, I would recite my address as “1082 rt.8, Glenshaw Glass, PA, 15116,” not realizing that the Glenshaw Glass plant (I’m still fuzzy on what actually went on there) wasn’t part of the Postal code. Living on the highway, we were never allowed to have pets, for fear they would get out and get hit by a car. We got used to the near-constant roar of cars and the thundering of 18 wheelers, having to pull U-turns between packs of cars, and being the last on the bus route home from school.

We—Mom, Dad, Art, and I—lived on a hill that had been flattened out enough to make room for a small row of houses. Behind our house there were hills covered in trees, and at the top of that were baseball fields that  my brother and I were never allowed to walk to. We had a wide side-yard to the left, in which I lost my walking stick from Germany, and to the right was a (very) little copse that we turned into a tree fort. Next to that lived my cousins, for a while, and then Mr. and Mrs. Miller, who composted and had a rock garden (a term I never understood, since you couldn’t grow rocks). We had snakes and deer trails, groundhogs and rats, mice and spiders. We had a steep of maybe 25 wooden steps from the parking lot below to the house above that, when the time came to sell the house, actually scared a couple so badly that the wife refused to leave her car.  

We were maybe a mile away from the Eat’n Park (The place for smiles.) where my dad caught the bus to work most days. We would drive our old station wagon to pick him up, and if we were lucky, he would have a Tootsie Pop for Art and I. Mom would switch to let Dad drive sometimes, or sometimes he just got in the car, and we would head back down the road.

A mile the other way were the Shaler Flats, right next to a creek that flooded every year. There were lots of floods, but I don’t remember any of them, except the one from my Senior year of high school, from Hurricane Ivan. There was one the year I was born, I think, that took away my Uncle Ron’s car. He had gotten out of it because he couldn’t see to drive anymore, and went and sat on the side of the road, on a hill. A few minutes later, the water was so high that when a wave came, it just picked up his car and carried it away. That’s where the story always ended, so I never knew what happened to the car.

Each year, we got snow. My dad would shovel out a place in the driveway for our cars, and pile the snow into the empty space between us and the Miller’s. My brother and I would stand on the wall above the driveway, and jump into the snow, up to our knees, or our waists. We would sled down the small bump between the Miller’s house and our own. One year, after a particularly strong snowfall, a tree from our copse fell down and came very close to hitting our house. My mom tells me that Art and I collected the pine cones from it and sold them to a local florist for a penny a piece; we each made $7. One year my brother and I were sick with the flu, and couldn’t go outside to play. Our cousins built us snowmen and gave them signs, telling us to get better soon and come out to play. Our parents brought snow into the kitchen, and we played with it in pans.

We moved from the old house when I was in the middle of first grade. We thought it would take forever for the house to sell because of the location, but it only took four months. I’ve called it The Old House ever since. Art and I couldn’t sleep at the new house, because it was too quiet without the trucks and the cars constantly whizzing by.

Route 8 is the main vein into Pittsburgh for the North Hills, so on field trips to the Zoo and the Benedum center, I would always sit on the left side of the bus. I would put my head against the window, and grab my seat mate, and say, “I used to live there.” I get quiet, contemplative, driving by it. It’s sold several times since we’ve moved, but it is still my Old House.

This place is my perpetual childhood. It wasn’t a perfect place—it leaked, the pipes had a tendency to freeze up in the winter, there were mice living in the walls—but the woods were my playground. All of my memories from it are fuzzy, warm, and soft, like the pictures that I have. It's a place that begs for reflection any time I go by. That, in turn, has helped me become such a reflective person overall. 

Some pictures.

Asked, and Answered. 

Here's Orion in the night sky. The three bright starts int he middle are his "belt," and that's what I use to find him. Sometime they also show an arm outstretched on the left side, too. I can never see those starts, though...

My backyard, from the side. 

The sunset yesterday (or maybe today? It's been a very long weekend). 

Place Post #1

My place: North and South Farmview Drive in Dover, DE; the neighborhood where I walk my dog each day. M. is a coworker I live near, and we walk our dogs together often.

Above me is our favorite Winter constellation, or Orion. My astronomy professor had nicknamed all of the constellations, but our favorite Winter constellation is the only one I remember. Every night when I take Sadie out before bed, it is right above us, sometimes a little more to the left if I’m early, sometimes almost over my fence if I am late.

Earlier, I was walking down to pick up M. and her dog, Daisy, and the moon was just above the houses, a dark yellow color, glowing . It looked full to me then, but this morning when I was driving to school, I realized it was waning, just a bit, and it was a pale white again.

Tonight’s final walk consists of me opening my sliding glass door and stepping out onto my concrete back porch, having Sadie take a few steps out onto the grass, and telling her to pee. It’s getting colder out, and although we have lighted sidewalks in the neighborhood, I don’t like walking Sadie late at night by myself. Sadie is sniffing around the grass that I haven’t cut since mid-November until she finds a patch that doesn’t come up to her knees. She squats, but I can still see her nose puffing up and down, like a rabbit, as she sniffs around. And I am looking at Orion, thinking about how I used to follow it back to my dorm room after night classes, about how I can find it on my back porch when I’m at my parent’s house.

You can only see Orion in winter; it’s the only constellation I know.

Sadie is up, not quite standing, and tense. She has seen something in the darkness, and I hope it isn’t a rabbit, because I didn’t put her leash on her for this trip. I shift my weight back towards the door, and I step on something that makes a scraping noise. Sadie responds almost instantly, coming back toward me, nose to the ground again. She sniffs once or twice more, then runs around me, and back into the house. She sits a few feet from the door, waiting for me to come back in.

I have stepped on a splinter of wood from my fence. The duplex’s back yard is split by this fence, which curves about eight to ten feet out of the house. It was slightly damaged in Hurricane Irene this summer, and so the panels don’t all fit together correctly anymore. The splinter is a little longer than my hand, and just a little fatter than the widest part of my thumb. It tapers at the end. It is a good six to eight feet away from the fence, and it has been blown towards my house. I have no idea how it got here, or what made it break the way it did.

Sadie whines from inside. I throw the splinter into the grass and come inside too. Sadie bolts upstairs. It is time for bed.