Labor Day

Bryant Avenue North: Late afternoon

09/02/2013

Ours is the house across the street from the tattooed blonde gardening beneath the lazy sway of her front porch's American flag.  

In our own backyard, the sunflowers are leaning their faces over the fence and brushing up on their Spanish, mute spectators of the series of volleyball matches that have been conducted by our neighbors all day long.  

Behind the sunflower fence and across the alley drive, the aroma of grilled meat wafts from a hazy back porch.  

Two shouting boys tear down the alley and leap up the curb where our trash and recycling bins are standing.  They huddle beside the bins until they realize that I am watching them from behind the irrepressible sprawl of the tomato plant in our raised garden bed.  A moment's blinking surprise, a flicker of sheepish grins, and they are bolting back down the drive, leaving me to continue my happy work of harvesting the perfect ripe grape tomatoes from the drooping vines.  

Once indoors, I arrange these fruits on the counter beside my harvest of four juicy beefsteaks and a clutch of dusty carrots.  

Within the mission-style interior of our home the sounds of the neighborhood drift in through the open windows: an ice cream truck's ditty weaving through the streets, cars blasting music, voices of children and voices of adults, a rowdy array of accents and tones quarreling and laughing and hollering.  They keep me company as I do my afternoon housekeeping: loads of laundry, menu-planning, floor sweeping, dish-washing, food-preparing.  

Soon enough the food will be eaten, the laundry folded into closet drawers, the dishes air-dried on the kitchen rack.  I will take Janie out to the back stoop and watch the horizon-hugging lights of Orion signal the advent both of twilight and autumn.