Swann song
I miss the tall ginkgos with their rotting
fruits, the way the berries felt beneath my
feet with just enough crunch, a pleasure to
step on. The sidewalk was covered with ginkgo
leaves, too, bright yellow fans dampened with
the rain. A storm had come through the night
before, had knocked the leaves off along with
the fruit. The air was full of the smell of
them, acrid, rotting, sweet.
We were lost and I was defensive about it,
but if you were going to be lost, this was
the neighborhood to be lost in. The street
was tunneled in by wide brick rowhouses,
voluptuous Victorians with turrets and
whimsical windows accented with stone. Each
house had a set of black iron steps, shiny
and slick, one-two-three-four, up to the
entry. The steps made little caves over doors
to English basements, a term which conjures
up mold and damp and a view of other peoples’
ankles, the angling of a dog’s leg as it
releases a spray of urine against low iron
window bars.
He got angry with me after I got angry with
him and we had an embarrassing fight in front
Martha, a hissy fit that revealed more than
we intended. A tense moment with the map
revealed my mistake and our luck: we were
three blocks from Adams Morgan, a short walk
to a few cold beers and a platter of
Ethiopian food. The three of us marched from
Swann Street to 18th Street, walked uphill
against a thin wind. It was getting dark,
people were bundled up against the cold. We
walked without talking, single-file past the
homeless, the crazies, the young people with
their know-everything attitude. And then we
shared a meal with all the awkwardness of
something being over, knowing we had years to
go before it would really end.
This is from a Round Robin
prompt this week, my (slightly edited)
response to a very different photograph.
Photo by
Antediluvial.
