Traveling Solo: Time Lapse

Today, Jan and I walked across the street to take one last look at Allen's house (the oldest house in Alamo Heights) before it is demolished. Two years after Allen's death, the weeds are thigh-high. Rat traps cover the Saltillo tile floors, and the house looks pathetic and lifeless, as abandoned houses do.

Before gathering a few stones for Jan's yard before the wreckers come, I watched Jan's daughter and grandson working in the yard, building a stone walkway, planting flowers. Later, I heard two little brothers making screeching boy sounds, perking up our formerly childless block. At that moment, I thought: I wish I had a time-lapse video of the comings and goings on this block for the past two decades!

When I drove up to this house for the first time, 18 years ago, Allen came over to greet me. He looked like Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and he beamed as he welcomed me to the neighborhood I've called home ever since. Every Friday night, he took me out to dinner and a movie, easing me into the solo life I'd just embarked on after divorce.

If there had been a booby prize for the ugliest house in Alamo Heights, this house might have won it. Flat-roofed, all concrete, no grass in sight--it was not vaguely attractive. It had a peeling brown deck on the front, cracks everywhere, and the interior looked like it had been painted by stoned teenagers.

The orange formica in the kitchen was buckling; the carpets smelled like bottled cherries. (Apparently, the previous tenant had owned about twenty cats, and the cherry deodorizer was intended to mask those feline presences.) I signed the lease for a year and hauled in my daughter's left-behind mattress and slept happily on the floor of a room in which the paint from the walls and the ceilings blurred together raggedly. I loved it!

Like the house, I was ragged and frumpy and sad. We needed each other, this house and I.

A couple of years later, the house became, officially, mine--thanks to the generosity of my parents! My feet barely touched the ground after they called to tell me they'd bought it "for a Christmas present." I had long dreamed of owning a little house, and I'd have chosen this funky little house over anybody's mansion. I didn't want a beautiful house; I wanted a house with possibilities.

All these years, a board at a time, slowly, slowly, I've turned it into the house it is today--stuccoed, painted pale pink. Last night as I watched Jan's and my grandchildren playing together, running from her house to mine, I thought: this is exactly where I want to be.

I always think of Gene, Jan's late-husband, when the blooms come out on the pomegranate tree in my yard, as they are doing this week. Two years before Gene died, he and Jan came over one Sunday morning and planted the two-foot shrub it was. Gene and I greeted each other every morning as he was watering his yard and I was getting in my car for my morning coke run. "Hi, Lin!" he'd say--he the only person who ever called me that. I miss his presence on our street.

Where Allen's house now stands, two new larger houses are about to be built. Like many of the smaller houses in the "cottage district," it will soon be gone, along with all the leafy trees in the yard. This is progress, this is life. But hovering over it all are the echoes of those who are no longer here.

Before my time, there were two little old ladies on the street who walked to each other's houses to visit. Neighbors who've been here a long time remember how they walked, carrying their handbags, and how they spent their days together, playing bridge, drinking wine, and giving each other home permanents.

If I had that time-lapse video, I'd pause it and take a closer look at those two little old ladies. I like to imagine what it was like, before computers, before cell phones, before Spandex-clad runners and leashed dogs, when the women of Ogden Lane took the time to just sit together and talk about whatever women talked about in those days.

Jan and I don't do perms, but we've decided to dub ourselves the Little Old Ladies of Ogden Lane.