Saturday, while I was vacuuming out a car and weeding when the mood struck, and Jut was mowing, a tan truck pulled up in front of our house. It was rusty and old, dented. The driver didn’t seem to mind that he was parked in the wrong direction. I flagged down Jut as the driver climbed out of the truck and shuffled up to us.
He wanted to know, he said, he wanted to know if our neighbor next door was okay. “I’m not nosy,” he said, “but I just haven’t seen her lately. I used to see her all the time when I drove past, but I haven’t seen her lately.” He was a short, round, with wizened skin and scruffy gray whiskers. He wore overalls and a coat, a hat, his teeth were old, he peered up at us with watery gray eyes. We told him she was still coming out, nearly every day, that we see her raking and sweeping and weeding. “She’s in her nineties, you know,” he said, and we said that yes, we knew that. We said we hadn’t seen her that day, but we had seen her the day before.
He said he remembered every spring when he would drive past, he would see Mr. Fox (the man who lived here before us) holding a ladder while our neighbor would be up cleaning out the gutters. We laughed and said she told us about that. “You’ve heard that story?” and we said, yes, we’d heard it and believed it.
The sun was bright, I shielded my eyes with my dirty hands while my husband talked. The man asked Jut how we liked it here, what part of Wyoming we had lived in, his daughter was out in Colorado and told him about the snow last week. After a few minutes of awkward conversation, he went back to his truck and drove off.
Jut started the mower again and I returned to the weeds in the front flower bed. Later, while I was carrying limbs and weeds to the compost heap and he was putting away the mower, I asked who the man was. Jut didn’t know, he said he stopped once before and talked to him. He said the man has a farm, and was friends with Mr. Fox and our neighbor, he guessed. Jut couldn’t remember his name.
It was very windy, and the blackbird who loves the new bird feeder cried down at us.
I like the feeling of dry mud under my nails, and I like it here.
Love,
black sheeped
