Very little is clear to me with regards to the future except a handful of what I believe to be modest expectations. One of these is having a backyard by the time I am fifty. Though I am not sure why, I have strong reason to believe that a yard will be key in maintaining sanity and keeping the doldrums of my golden years at bay.
This comes from recent observations of my parents and their neighbors. Don and Eileen Stewart still live in the two-story colonial that housed all eight members of my immediate family from the time I was seven until my hasty departure at eighteen. The backyard, though massive by my standards after years of apartment living, is average for the neighborhood.
For most of my upbringing, it was dominated by an above-ground swimming pool; a fact that I refuse to be ashamed of despite the guarded (and slightly snarky) reactions of some of the less tactful of my friends. I will always have fond memories of the neighborhood kids coming over and pretending to like us for three months out of the year, and the handful of occasions we managed to get our parents to drink enough to go swimming after dinner on a hot summer evening.
And so it was that for many years I thought of our backyard as a vehicle for the pool and little else. Recently, when my parents got rid of the pool altogether, I began to suspect that the yard was being re-purposed. However, it was only in the past few days that the pieces finally came together.
Theories abounded in the interim-the planting of shrubbery and a tree in the area where the pool once stood indicated that my father was pursuing a new hobby. Ultimately, though, the burst of landscaping enthusiasm subsided, proving to be yet another one of Don's "neurotic hemorrhages".
My next thought went to the dogs. Three now live at the house-two cocker spaniels (Maggie and Oliver), and an ancient, desiccated chihuahua (Candy-not named by my parents). The problem is that all three are decidedly uninterested in a large yard to explore, and my parents have relegated their canine adventures in the backyard to a small area my mother refers to as "shit alley". There went that theory.
Then, just the other day, I was in the kitchen reading about Laura Branigan (I had entered one of those Wikipedia chains that start with an entry on the history of numerology and lead to a dead 80's pop star), when my mother flew past me and straight out of the back door. I didn't immediately check on her until I realized that I had moved from Laura Branigan to Norse mythology and had not seen her come back into the house.
I strolled over to the screen door and peered outside at my mother standing in the middle of the yard, one hand resting on her chest, the other at her side gripping a can of Bud Light. She was stock still, the only movement being the fluttering of her sundress (May heralds the donning of this particular warm weather staple for her) in the breeze.
Her gaze was fixed but unfocused. She just stood there. And I just stood there in the doorway watching her. The word "communing" kept popping into my head; though Eileen, with her can of beer and acrylic nails, seemed an unlikely candidate for this transcendent moment I appeared to be witnessing. Still, a wave of embarrassment came over me, as if I had intruded on something private, special. So I turned away and pretended not to have seen anything when she finally came back into the house ten minutes later.
The very next day I was taking a walk with my sister and her dog, Maya, an energetic and slightly nervous pit bull/lab mix. We were hoping to tire the dog out with a long meandering through the neighborhood, and spent a lot of time reminiscing and telling stories about the various houses and families surrounding us.
About halfway through the walk, I was momentarily startled by a man standing on his front lawn. He surprised me because as we had approached, he'd been possessed by that same stillness I'd witnessed in my mother the evening before. I didn't register his presence until we were mere feet away, when he softly cleared his throat. I was taken aback for an instant, but kept walking, and watched him shift his weight slightly, his painfully white sneakers squeaking on the waxy grass, his eyes as empty and mysterious as my mother's.
In subsequent days, whether it be while walking the dog, driving my siblings to work, or staring out of the living room window, I witnessed this suburban zombification no less than four times (in addition to the aforementioned instances). In all cases, the victims were 55+, alone, and standing in THEIR YARDS. Caught in a sublime and horrific trance. A paralyzed dervish in a temple garden of hanging planters, manicured shrubbery, and oscillating sprinklers.
The older the devotee, the more intense and lasting the episode. One particular woman of about seventy was taken away in the middle of watering her roses. So arresting was the scene that I almost intervened...then thought better of it.
For me, all of these episodes coalesce into a convincing, albeit incomplete body of evidence that implicates a connection between one's yard, latter life, and a...contemplative? Meditative? Transitional? Larval? state of being. Think a combination of Cocoon, Night of the Living Dead, and Weekend at Bernie's.
This discovery is, I am sure, only the tip of the iceberg. The laundry list of questions it raises unsettles me, and yet; I feel as if I've been gifted with a glimpse of my own future. Running on intuition, I stepped out onto my front lawn this afternoon, ready for...nothing. Which is what I got. That and the side eye from the nosy old crow next door, whose attention eventually moved away from me and into that elderly otherworld bounded by a patch of grass, a slate walkway, and a gravel driveway.
