There's a Blind Lady on the Block

 

Welcome to the houses I have lived in, and some I didn’t.  We will visit them all as we go but right now, come on in.  My present little home is a 1100 square feet townhouse where I live with my two-year-old (if it’s here can I eat it?) yellow Labrador present guide dog.

 

There was a time when you could have recognized my house by all the mail on my front porch.  You see, the mailboxes are down the street and with all the bulk of unwanted excess mail we get these days often residents unknowingly used to leave a piece or two on the ground.  Sooner or later, all these missed mails made their way to my door by other well-meaning neighbors who saw it on the ground and just assumed automatically that surely it was the blind lady on the block who must have dropped them. 

   

The day I moved in, there were two one-year-old grandchildren plus a four-year-old one in tow.  It was a hot day so I ran water in the little wading pool and listened to happy sounds of water splashing and children’s squeals.  That was before my elderly neighbor tapped me on the shoulder to hand me a book of homeowners do’s and don’ts, mostly don’ts. 

 

“Now you need to keep those toys picked up out of the yard,” she told me, "because they don’t tell you when they plan to mow.”

 

“Okay," I said.  “I’ll listen for them and if I hear them I’ll run out and be sure they are picked up.”

 

“Oh no you can’t do it that way,” she told me.  “You see sometimes they mow two or three times a week.”

 

I have now lived here over eighteen years and I believe what she meant to say was that sometimes they actually mow two times every three weeks, just haven’t figured it out yet, but no worries as the grandchildren are grown now.  

 

The neighbors are truly good to me.  Just last Saturday morning I had planned to sleep late when my doorbell rang at 7 AM.

 

“Honey, your cab is here,” a lady said.

 

“But I didn’t call one,” I answered. 

 

I smiled as I drank my first cup of coffee and wondered how long I would be thought of as the blind lady on the block.

 

My patio is larger than most of the others.  You see it was small and I wanted a fence, not to keep my neighbors out but to keep the children in.  So I took bids for the job, then threw them all away and hired a young man named Tom, who was just out of jail. 

 

Brittany, my oldest grandchild, then age four, swung on the fence posts Tom set into the cement singing “Jesus loves the little children.”  Tom sat down on the glider and cried as he told me how his little sister, age four had died. 

 

Now there are tree sprouts shooting up through  a  crack in the cement, and I had to get the fence latch fixed.

 

“You got what you paid for,” a friend told me and wondered why I just smiled.  He didn’t know that I  was listening to a little girl singing inside my head.

 

Someone else told me that I needed to organize my thoughts, poems, and, mostly, my life.  So, since I have pretty much started at the “now,” I will start all over on the next pages until there is a full circle.  There will be transition steps I call poems along the way.  Thanks for your company.