If you’d asked me two years ago, even a year ago, the answer might have been different.
Looking back at those days, before everything, is like looking at a closed store.
All the things you want are there, but you can’t get at them.
Back then Allie and I lived in that house, the one with the roof that everyone commented on, the one with the red metal.
We’d stopped trying to explain that it wasn’t our idea to have the roof; it’d come with the house.
There was a history to it that stretched out way before we ever took possession of the house, before we’d even thought of moving here.
We were the Andersons.
Before us was the Franks and before that some other couple, some other family which, according to the neighbour, my wife looks like that wife, the one before the one before us.
And probably so on back to the day that the first white guy arrived in his covered wagon and planted his little stick that said this was his land from now on.
This was in “The Old Days”, before a subdivision went up on the west side of the road, when there was the backyard, the fence, the road and then …..nothing, other than old farm fields that were reverting to meadow and patches of woods.
Now there were God knows how many houses there.
Rows and rows of the same five designs randomly sprinkled through ten square blocks.
“Meridian Hills”.
Catchy if meaningless name, I guess.
But it provided fodder for my stories.
I liked standing in the “Office”, a cubby-hole at the end of the hall between the two bedrooms, and looking out over the backyard, the road and the houses beyond.
You could watch people as they soundlessly went about their lives.
The fat guy with the thing for Bloody Marys before dinner, then Scotch after everyone else had gone to bed.
The handsome guy in the Spanish Revival with the green shingles that I was sure was having a thing with his teenage daughter, unless I was mis-reading the body language.
The girl in the upstairs bedroom of the Santa Fe Ranch-house who was looking back at us the way I was looking at them.
Both of us in this moment in our lives, hers near the beginning of it; me middle-aged.
She fascinated me most of all.
I gave her a name and a history.
Molly, short for Margaret, which she hated.
Good at Math, not so great at English.
Had her eye on a girl in the next grade up but wasn’t sure if it was a crush or not.
The next week I noticed the curtains were down, so her house was either being reno-ed or they were moving.
Sure enough , three weeks later there was a different girl in that window.
I called her Moira, to go with her red hair.