“She had come to the house as a bride seventy years ago. There were only two bedrooms, but she’d raised four children here with Roland. He was twenty years dead, but sometimes she was sure she heard the sound of his feet coming up the wooden steps to the front porch.
When the children were young, the weedy lot behind the house was their own personal playground. Now it was the reason the four of them pushed her to move in with one of them, or move anywhere that they deemed safer. The area had become more commercial; her bedroom window was just a few feet from the parking lot of a Shell gas station.
The secret she kept was how the parking lot was the nightly version of the stories she’d watched when her babies were napping in the old days. Every night after the kitchen was clean and she’d had her bath, she turned off the lights, rested among her pillows and quilts, and watched through the window. Broken boards in the wooden fence gave her a TV-sized view of the nightly dramas. She’d seen mamas nursing babies. Couples courting and fighting and breaking up. People who had someone else at home stealing moments with a secret love. Drug dealers, panhandlers, weary travelers, teenagers with nowhere to go: They were all her characters.
She wasn’t moving anywhere.”
I take photos. I write. My volunteer job is taking photos of rescued dogs and cats transported by the rescue group whose records I manage. Since working and volunteering don’t leave me a lot of time to write, I’m spending 2017 borrowing from what these dogs and cats are writing. They said it’s okay.