Place Blog #1

I walked into the backyard for the first time the other day. It was in the evening, and I had planned to drive down the block (I wasn’t walking in the snow and slush along a busy route in 10-degree weather) to Giant Eagle for a few groceries before coming back to explore the back yard. But when I walked outside and looked at the sun, I changed plans. In the winter, the sun goes down faster than in the summer. It was behind a cloud, spreading orange and pink light like watercolors along the western sky. In less than an hour, it would’ve set fully and been too dark for me to walk over unknown terrain. So instead of walking around the car to get into the driver’s seat, I walked past it, up my neighbor’s driveway onto a raised bit of land that was the only boundary line between our yards.

The way into the back yard was like a tunnel bridge. The space between my house and the neighbor’s overhang garage and house wall was about five feet, and the houses seemed to rise forever on either side. My yard was at least a foot or two higher than my neighbor’s driveway. Walking along that stretch of land was almost like a gateway into a different world. But when I reached the end, it was just a back yard.

My yard isn’t very large—just a plot of land barely wider than my house. To the left side, a housemate had erected a tall, pointed wooden fence that leveled off in segments going down to the garage. There was an overturned wheelbarrow and an overturned white plastic lawn chair. Nothing spectacular there. To the right, however, the yard opened into many other yards, displaying swing sets, garages and sheds that all ran parallel with a graveled back lane. This stretch ended with a tall church steeple of the brick Presbyterian church and house that my housemate came from. The sky, too, opened before me. Instead of the dusty blue and purple hues of twilight, I encounter a bright splash of orange, pink, and yellow from the sunset. In the few moments, it took me to traverse the tunnel bridge, though, the sun and clouds had each shifted enough to produce a light ray that rose straight upward from the middle of the cloud. One column of pure light amongst color.

But I knew my blog couldn’t be about the sky from the view of my place, it had to be about my place, so I turned back around. This time, I noticed tracks. Three distinct trails of what I assume to be cat tracks lead from where I stood to the garage, then angled away like a billiard ball rebound, then a random one leading toward the house. The garage itself is more like a two-storied barn or workman’s garage. Painted with peeling, fading white, the garage is covered with many windows through which I could see mounds of junk. I still have no idea what is in there, I only know that another housemate (the first’s wife and my best friend, who both own the house) went in there with her grandmother to rummage through the junk in order to find anything valuable to sell. The door is broken and hanging ajar, and that is where the cat tracts converge.

When I turned to leave, I noticed that my own tracks had crossed with the cat’s, and I wondered if our paths would ever cross in the future.