Roswell
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

The porch and backyard lights were lit in the same places as though the familiar neighbors who lived on the street 20 years ago were still there, not dead or dispersed, the properties not taken over by their children or new proprietors. The lights though bright gave off a small glow compared to the sulking black night, warding off the shadows and all the impending doom that can befall a suburban neighborhood. The hills follow the houses up an incline so that each one has dense trees overshadowing the rooftops, creeping over the angles above the attics. The dirt is closer to the backs of some homes than others, and those closest burn the night lamps brightest. Whatever animals there were in these hills, aside from the birds and owls, the squirrels and opossums, fled along time ago when the railroad used to run through the hillside. Not far from the Missouri River, the train cars carried coal to the power plants and the dense steel locomotive engines burned their own coal, and dumped it here so that when we played as kids, we’d unearth rusted rail ties, the tops still flat and the edges rough from where they’d been hammered into the ground. The dirt was rich with burned coal, orange-burned at the edges as though it was still fiery, while other pieces were black and pocked, like lost moons that had fallen unnoticed into our backyard Eden.

One summer, when my ability to remember was staring to come to me, I went out to the backyard and ran up the hillside, unexplained, into the tangled tree branches and slopes, and there was a small steep, narrow gulley near the main trails’ start where I laid in the rivulets. The morning sun shone through the bare spots in the shimmering leaves. I looked up. Throughout the branches, a net that had been woven, and I remember it being thorny, connecting the little spot together like the underside to an umbrella, and I felt safe there. I always did, on the hill as we cleverly named it. I laid there and looked up at the thorny-netted rooftop, free here from my parents, in a place that never intrigued my older brother, beyond the backyards and the points of care from the neighbors, and between my neighborhood and the farm a long way behind us and next to it, a flower nursery that used train cars as working stations and places to store flowers. At one time, I knew every inch of it, every fallen tree branch, every bird’s nest.

I drove up the street, the night less ominous and instead beginning to nestle the street and houses and trees together and yet still be haunting. When I was a boy, the city went gradually into decay, and in the span of three years went from a livable neighborhood where you could sit out on the porch with neighbors deep into the early hours to a place where you weren’t sure what was going to step out of the night. On a Wednesday, close to 1 a.m., no one was out. The night was warm, and the bar I’d just left kept the door open, but it had gotten cool enough that it should have been closed. I was cold as I steered by my old house, and stared at the two cars in the driveway and the one out front. We never had more than one car in the drive, usually none. The house looked the same. I looked at my old bedroom window where I used to sleep in a small, square room with carpet with alternating red, blue and yellow strands tightly woven together so that the carpet looked like fire. The walls were sunshine yellow, and then when I was in high school, I wanted it all gray. Gray walls, gray carpet, no color. I remember lying in bed afraid that the arms of the plants in the flowerbed that tapped my bedroom window were actually kidnappers, and I slept for a year or more with a pillow partially covering my head and the sheets pulled up to my chin.

On a night like this, I would have been scared. The plants would have come rapping on the window screen for me, and I would have forgotten how much I loved about the old house until I’d gotten older, and come back to see how colorless my life has become.