In the Neighborhood

I’m back in my old neighborhood. I drove all night to get here, close to ten hours. I parked my car on the side of the road across from my old house and stepped out. I haven’t breathed the air of my childhood in almost ten years. It is crisp and green in my nose, transporting me to autumn at age six, and age ten, and age fifteen; a lifetime of falls. Now I stand on the sidewalk, the sidewalk I rode my bike on countless times, countless years ago. I feel the ghost of my younger self speed by. She ruffles my skin and hair in her passing breeze, and she smells like youth. Goosebumps across my flesh.

It feels strange to be back here under these circumstances. I know that this is the last time I will be in this place. It feels fitting that this particular journey will end where I began.

The house across the street is achingly familiar. I see the windows that peer into my childhood bedroom, and I wonder if the walls are still light blue. The house looks nice, newly painted on the outside, red door, white shutters. There’s a new wooden fence, something my family had never managed to add during the two decades we’d spent there, and there’s a new carport addition. It is clear that costly improvements have been made - the current residents of my old home are probably much better off than we had been. Their children will live very different lives to the lives we had, I think. Then I remember. Oh, wait. Never mind. I see the ancient basketball hoop, somehow still standing, and I am impressed by its longevity. I wonder if they ever play with it. I wonder if they have explored the woods behind the house, the woods that circle the neighborhood, if the children have mapped it out like we did.

Why had I decided to come here? Why had my gut told me to make this trip when I heard the terrible, terrible news? Why, upon hearing of the upcoming demise of all life on earth, did I decide to drive all night to the neighborhood where I grew up?

I decide that I have spent enough time looking at my old house, and my feet carry me away down the sidewalk. The circling of roads throughout this neighborhood by the woods is ingrained into my muscle memory. I pass willow trees that hang like curtains - I always loved those trees. It’s early, and the sun is still making its way over the Appalachian Mountains, golden fingers reaching into the valley to scoop it up in one golden palm. I see children waiting at the end of driveways, walking to bus stops, their breath visible in the chilly morning air. It is a normal school day for them, and for their parents, and for their teachers. I remember when I was among the children waiting at the bus stops each morning. I’d wait with my sister and my neighbor, our mothers watching us from the window holding cups of steaming coffee. At the other stops, we would pick up my friends, the other kids that came to the block parties and the birthday parties. There was a time that everyone in the neighborhood knew each other. I don’t recognize any of these children now.

Last night my husband came home from work and told me the news. He told me that informants at NASA had given him and the other members of the Senate undeniable proof that an asteroid is on track to hit the planet. It was unlikely that anyone would survive. I asked him when. He told me tomorrow.

There are unfamiliar cars in lots of the driveways. Some of the folks from those old days still live here, but others have clearly moved away and their homes have been filled with younger, richer families, like mine has. The Browns never had a Jeep, I think. They must be gone now too. The road loops through the willow trees and takes me past the drainage pond in the center of the neighborhood. Unlike much of this place, this little pond is unchanged. It was always its own ecosystem, an untouched paradise for box turtles and herons and deer, surrounded by a fence with ancient “No Trespassing” signs dangling from the chain links, willows hanging. I remember the summer it rained so hard that the banks of the pond burst, spreading its wild waters and grasses across the roads and into our yards. There had been small silver fish and cattails and bright green algae that sparkled like emeralds, and we all learned a lot about life within the pond that day.

It turns out my husband - his name is Tate - had learned of the pending apocalypse months ago. He claimed that he had been sworn to confidentiality, that government officials had taken an oath of silence to prevent chaos from descending over the masses, but I am not the masses. He could have told me. It wouldn’t be the first time he had let something slip from work - I had heard about the raid on Trump’s vacation home the night before it happened. That feels like a lifetime ago, even though it was only a year. A year ago our relationship was okay. Not great, but better than the cold and distant shackle that held us now, a divide widened by long work hours and things unsaid and the dawning realization that we don’t actually know each other at all anymore, after all these years. I suppose that’s why I didn’t hesitate to leave Tate behind to come here. I suppose that, faced with the end of the world, I had to be with the love of my life, which up until today, I hadn’t realized was this place.

Is it possible to love a place in this way? I had fallen in love here. I walked down to this soccer field, the grass now growing tall, to make out with my first boyfriend. We’d made love a year later for the first time in that same light blue childhood bedroom I had looked upon minutes ago. I had also been loved here - this was where my family had been. This was where my friends lived, the friends that I used to collect worms with that I now follow on Instagram and cheer on from a distance. I should message them while I can. Nobody remains here now, but when I picture my family as a whole unit, as we were back then, I see us here. I see my happiest moments all around me. The memories run deep in this place; they’re in the dirt and the water and the air. 

What will it look like when all this is over? What will remain?

What will anyone have to show for, in the end, that we were even here at all?

I am lost in my thoughts and drenched in nostalgia when a cheerful voice calls to me, waking me from myself. It is Christine, a friend of my mother’s, one of the few people from our original crowd of families who is still in her home. Her children have both moved out of state.

“Lucille! What a surprise, I hardly recognized you there. At first I wasn’t sure, but you just look so much like your mother. What brings you to town?”

Her face is older now, her hair streaked with gray, but she still looks exactly like herself. I flash back to the time her daughter and I had accidentally spilled a can of green paint down the stairs in a failed attempt to give her room a makeover. Christine, or Mrs.McClain to me back in those days, hadn’t lost her temper with us. She had always been a kind woman.

Should I tell her? I think to myself. She has the right to know - everyone does. But at the same time, what would be the use of creating torment for this woman in front of me in her last five to six hours of existence? I decide to pay back some of her kindness by sparing her from the knowledge of a destiny she could not change. Let this woman be happy this morning, in this place.

“Hi Christine, great to see you. It’s been a long time. I’m on my way to visit my mom and I was in the neighborhood.”

“Well, how nice. Tell your mother I say hello. You take care now.”

“Thanks, you too. Please give my best to Nick and Rachel - I mean that.” 

I walk on and the fabric of my past wraps itself around me. I hope that wherever I end up next, there are willow trees.