This old house was supposed to be the birthplace of new beginnings while simultaneously solidifying the relationships at hand. It ended up being a brief shelter that I was grateful to have acquired before my internal and external worlds collided to flame out in an explosion that has permanently damaged my hearing. First, William was diagnosed with a debilitating chronic illness and then Covid hit. I experienced my first set of panic attacks dealing with the isolation of a quarantine. We all adapted to new modes of suffering and attempted to continue our lives.
The house itself was remarkably dull. Everything was painted an unobtrusive beige. It was like living in a rather large sandbox. William did what he could to liven the place up and small improvements like painting a door forest green and adding a mantle he'd found somewhere to the living room's far wall helped give the place a slight allure though it never felt like home.
We'd lived downtown, center city, for more than a decade in an area carefully maintained to remain as tourist-friendly as possible. When we began searching for a house the only one that we could afford was on Caroline Street, nestled between the poorer sections to the South and the all-white, blue collar neighborhoods to the North. It was a culture shock that never truly eased for me. There was occasional gun play with shots startling us in the middle of the night. A group of teenagers once fired live rounds out of a car window just for the thrill of it in the church parking lot a few buildings away. A kid was later killed in the park only hundreds of feet from our backyard. There was also a coven of some kind that held mysterious, late night gatherings in the aforementioned park.. Our neighbors informed us of their nocturnal activities but I had never seen or heard them myself.
Upon our arrival, the street seemed rather quiet until our neighbors began making themselves an unavoidable nuisance. To our left, Laura and her Grateful Dead-loving bunch of druggies. They all owned motorcycles and took to roaring back home at three in the morning with a drunken flourish. To the right, two crackheads who were parents of four young children they often chose to neglect. There was rarely a dull moment much to our chagrin. We did luck out as first the would-be hippies took their 24/7 party elsewhere and eventually one crackhead parent went to jail for trying to strangle the other one. The cops discovered the drugs and that put an end to a rather miserable charade.
Of course thee are things I will miss from this turbulent era of six years. I had the best job I will ever have and through it met many wonderful people. We also had a couple of neighbors I grew to love and Caroline Street gifted us with Toby, our dear cat. William made several paintings and I published my first books in over a decade while breathing in fumes from the hot dog factory nearby and keeping at least one eye over our shoulders at all times. The old house never quite became a home despite our efforts to make it one. We decided to move to a strange town and crash landed once again in the poorer section of a struggling borough with a bevy of bizarre neighbors I'll probably end up writing about. I left my world behind me, not knowing what to expect but willing to open a fresh chapter of experience yet again. I pray the Gods will be kind to us here and perhaps we will flourish in new, unexpected ways?
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