A black air conditioner hums, cherries are anecdotally inside, and are being cooled by the faintest of degrees. Should there be some fruity unknown smell? There is none, but back through the house and out Heidis windows, there is a smell of fresh grass. I mean the kind that satellites watch for above some counties in California. It is always a strong smell and it makes me imagine that there are weeds, not fruit, in the gray cinder hulk next door, squat and soviet and heavily padlocked, but never opened.
The garden where the odor lies low and irregular is now freakishly green and overgrown. English Ivy has disobeyed orders and jumped rank. It has broken its corral and jumped borders, rushing like looters not soldiers, into the adjacent grass that grows unorganized and lethargic. The ivy is so profligate, it is almost ready to break rank and rush the next lawn over. It will overwhelm the fence; grow it over in less than a week. Sometime after that it will tease the neighbors dogs into some sort of final accident. Then, unchallenged, the lot next door will fill and fill and there will soon be nowhere to grow but up.
Meeting it, of course, is the massive wall of ivy, the opposing army, crawling down the far neighbors brick house. Its surface is a coral reef of complexity and several hundred birds must already fill the nooks and crannies. Three out of four side windows are completely obscured by leafy green and nests and bird. One can only imagine waking in a room where instead of a window there is a living diorama, a window from a zoo, a portrait of a birds life. The whole three-story mass of growth chirps and titters and moves as a mass, like a breeze moving on water, bringing to mind a possible hive-mind lurking therein. Walking down my walk, and looking to my left I eye the whistling mass like Hitchcock, waiting for a break, a silence to alert me of some immediate plot to end my worthless human life. In my darkest mood I imagine that there are no birds, there never were, but only ever bats. Hairy rabid things with needle white teeth and matted fur and claw that may hurl themselves at me at any moment. They tear my nerves on a daily basis as I leave that house in Red Hook.
But then I hit the sidewalk, I look right, and say a good morning to Lady Liberty before seeking the bus into the city.
The garden where the odor lies low and irregular is now freakishly green and overgrown. English Ivy has disobeyed orders and jumped rank. It has broken its corral and jumped borders, rushing like looters not soldiers, into the adjacent grass that grows unorganized and lethargic. The ivy is so profligate, it is almost ready to break rank and rush the next lawn over. It will overwhelm the fence; grow it over in less than a week. Sometime after that it will tease the neighbors dogs into some sort of final accident. Then, unchallenged, the lot next door will fill and fill and there will soon be nowhere to grow but up.
Meeting it, of course, is the massive wall of ivy, the opposing army, crawling down the far neighbors brick house. Its surface is a coral reef of complexity and several hundred birds must already fill the nooks and crannies. Three out of four side windows are completely obscured by leafy green and nests and bird. One can only imagine waking in a room where instead of a window there is a living diorama, a window from a zoo, a portrait of a birds life. The whole three-story mass of growth chirps and titters and moves as a mass, like a breeze moving on water, bringing to mind a possible hive-mind lurking therein. Walking down my walk, and looking to my left I eye the whistling mass like Hitchcock, waiting for a break, a silence to alert me of some immediate plot to end my worthless human life. In my darkest mood I imagine that there are no birds, there never were, but only ever bats. Hairy rabid things with needle white teeth and matted fur and claw that may hurl themselves at me at any moment. They tear my nerves on a daily basis as I leave that house in Red Hook.
But then I hit the sidewalk, I look right, and say a good morning to Lady Liberty before seeking the bus into the city.
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[Edited on Jun 20, 2003]