Home #6 Carol
Ann and John continued to visit for awhile after we moved to
our new home, but gradually the relationship dissolved; no longer neighbors, and
their teens now young adults forming their own relationships, starting
their own families, we lost our common thread. The new house had woods in the
back and on each side. The front yard
was deep and wide and fronted on a fairly busy road. On the left side, separated by a lot of
woods, lived the Sanders. I never met
Mrs. Sanders in the fourteen years I lived there, but Ed appeared at my door a
few months after we moved in, with an offering of venison, in a carefully
wrapped paper package, blood smeared across one side. “This is the best part of the deer” he said
proudly “very tender, just fry it up lightly in oil and you’ll have yourself a
real treat”. His eyes were small and
completely disappeared when he smiled.
He had a weather beaten face, but a kind smile. I thanked him profusely and put the package
in the freezer. Some time later, I
cooked it up for the dogs, handling the frozen meat with wary, New York City
hands. Who eats deer meat, I wondered.
During most of hunting season, when you drove past their
house, you could spot a deer stretched out in the doorway of the Sanders’
garage, draining its blood into buckets on the floor below. Behind the garage,
in the deep back part of his property, Ed had chicken coops and a rooster that
crowed all day intermittently, sometimes every hour.
After seven years, the property that lay between us, sold to
a young couple who built a house there.
They had a small boy and lots of energy for the big, modern house. The first Christmas after they moved in, three
year old Michael showed up at our door at 8am, as we were unwrapping. He stood there in his footed pajamas, his
hooded jacked unzipped. “Can I come in? Mommy and Daddy are still sleeping”. How
had he gotten out? Did he know it was
Christmas? We fed him some cereal, gave
him the small gift we had for him and then walked him back home, knocking
loudly to wake his parents up.
Across the street lived a pleasant family with three
teenagers (if a family with three teenagers can ever qualify for pleasant). The
father was a musician who taught music at a local high school, and drove into
the city one night a week to play clarinet in a jazz group. Jay was short, dark,
bearded and broody. He was bearded and wore
black all the time. He wore a beret and a
purse crossed over his shoulder. He seemed
exotic and out of place in the rural town we lived in. His loud, battered Volvo
started up in the morning with loud bangs and sputtering and great clouds of billowing
smoke.
His wife Carol was fair and red headed and pleasingly plump
with a contained bustiness, the sort that shook when she laughed and you
imagined she would be relieved at night when she took off her bra. She had a warm, winning smile and a
neighborly cheeriness about her, though she and I talked rarely, living on
opposite sides of a busy road as we did. We nodded and waved a lot. Occasionally
we arrived at our mailboxes at the same time and exchanged hellos and how are
you doings?
One beautiful day, as I arrived at the edge of the road to
get my mail, Carol called over hello. We
chatted across the street about the daffodils and the weeping willow for a few
minutes, and then, as the cars whizzed by between us, she called out “Jay left
us. He said he was tired of being a father and having so much responsibility.
He wants to concentrate on his music career now.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Was I envious of him and his newfound freedom or
relieved for her ( he seemed so morose and dark)?
Much later, I wondered what she thought when our own household
split like a house of cards and family treasures could be found heaped
curbside, placed there by an angry man, free for the taking.
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