Neighbors

Mr. Woods sits, afternoons, on the porch of the grey stone house across the street. A daughter sometimes sits with him and knits. “Cancer,” our neighbor Millie told us once.

Once or twice, while walking to his car, Dad waves and says, “Hey Woody,” and that’s all. A thick veil separates our dual worlds.

I watch their lives, a kind of pantomime. His wife comes out sometimes and stands there too, wearing her apron, then goes back inside. Silent movies must have been like this.

What knowledge can resolve the mystery: why lives in some homes open to my gaze, while others on this same street stay opaque?

On our own side of Waterman I know in happy, easygoing neighbor ways all five families up the block’s steep hill. Across the street, from our front porch I see three dramas, two of them involving friends.

A man named Carl, next door to the Woods, argues with his aged mom each day while walking to his car to drive to work, yet always turns to smile and wave at me.

Down on the corner, on the Woods’ other side lives Mrs. Hahn, raised on the East Texas plains, hand to forehead whenever dark clouds mass, scanning the sky for funnel shapes. She knows when time has come to shelter in the basement.

Farther up that side, more mysteries— people I know but do not really know, others whose names I’ve never even heard, walled behind the brown brick of their homes,

but the Woods live almost right across the street. From our front window, they’re the ones I see and cannot speak to — and cannot forget.