novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- dead thumb the backyard at my parents' house has been deserted. the water is brown and there aren't even any mosquitos. the orange tree is gone. the bridge is creaky and threatening. this is in stark contrast to the 80s when my family had money and my dad decided to waste most of it on koi ponds, these horrendous little concrete pools that inadvertently drowned two of our housepets. i can remember this area in its stages. how it was when we moved in, one of my earliest memories, how it looked when we fucked it up in the name of fish and some absurd notion that my dad could create a nice little mecca down here, how it looked after all the fish died and the moss escaped the rudimentary ponds, leaping for the gravel, drying out and turning a grayish green. the gnats. the citrus trees. i walked down there for a lemon yesterday, standing on the gravel pit that covered what used to be a rose garden, looking through the space where the monstrous orange tree used to stand at a wall of concrete and rocks, jutting out and in, just enough to admit that something used to grow in its middle. my strawberry patch.
the only thing that survived roughly a decade and a half of maltreatment is the christmas tree we planted in 1985. it is taller than a three-story building, and continues to grow. 12:37 pm - 04.26.03 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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