Channeling Gladys Kravitz* in the Hellstrip**

I don't know how it happened. 

How I became the nosy neighbor, the crotchety woman peering through the blinds. I promise you I am not a total karen, but the other day I could feel the itch to storm out onto the front lawn and shoo away the loud kids playing in the street at nearly midnight. 

I wasn't that bothered by the loudness or lateness, (although midnight is late!! And why did they have to yell so loudly??!!) No. It was the fact that they were trampling the flowers I'd just planted in my hellstrip. Every time a car drove by--which is a lot, because we live on a fairly busy street--the kids would jump onto the curb

AND ONTO MY NEWLY PLANTED FLOWERS!

But I took a deep breath and closed the blinds. The entire point of my hellstrip project was to plant hardy, non-fussy flowers, flowers I wouldn't mourn if a dog peed on them or someone traipsing back from the Starbucks dropped crumpled straw paper litter on them. I spent no money on this project. Everything was recycled. The seeds from plants I'd grown last summer. Clumps of flowers dug up from my backyard. The only cost was my time. 

Okay, it was a lot of time. 

I had to shovel up the grass and weeds and do my transplanting and set out mulch and flat rocks. And then there was the watering, to keep it all going through the 90 degree heatwave we were having. The work was done and my vision was coming to life and I was feeling joyful,

and then came the Night of Noise and Trampling. 

For a few angsty minutes I watched through the blinds and then closed them, embarrassed. I had a sudden memory of my younger brothers playing basketball in the driveway of the house where we grew up and how every time a ball bounced over the hedge, they jumped through the bushes into the next door neighbor's yard. That lady scared the crap out of all of us, 

charging out of her house to shout about her lawn and pristinely coiffed bushes. At some point my brothers stopped going over to get the ball because one of them got his legs torn up. The creepy rumor was that the lady had purposely planted deadly thorny roses next to her bushes. I don't know if this is true, but if it is, oh my God, what a loony tunes she was, I mean

these were just kids playing outside on a summer night, 

and anyway, plants will grow back. 

*Gladys Kravitz. The nosy neighbor in the old Bewitched TV series who was always trying to catch Samantha the witch doing something witchy. I always thought of her as anciently old, but it turns out, the actress who played the role, Alice Pearce, was in her mid forties when she appeared on the series.

**Hellstrip. What the people in my neighborhood call the strip of land between the front sidewalk and the street. In most places you'll find grass and/or weeds, but people around here like to plant flowers and other plants to attract bees and butterflies.  

Today we can take off our masks at the library

if we're vaccinated. And if we want to. We've stopped quarantining our materials for four days, but we still have our plexiglass partitions, which I hate. It's hard to hear what patrons are saying, and inevitably, I have to roll out from behind the partition on my roll-y chair so I can hear them better. Especially the mumbly kids, 

who aren't old enough to be vaccinated and still wear their masks, so maybe I should keep wearing mine too in solidarity? And how do we go from wearing a mask every day to just... not, and how do we know who's vaccinated, and odds are it's 50/50 around where I live, and I'm no longer worrying for myself at the moment because I understand how vaccines work, but what about dangerous variants--

and all of this analysis of risk and what my responsibilities are to my fellow human beings is making me tired. I just want to talk about books,

the book I read last week, for example, called Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips which takes place on a remote peninsula in Russia where two little girls have gone missing. All of the chapters are different, interlocking stories, women in the area, who are doing the best they can, but feeling trapped and everything they know about their world seems to be changing and it's hard for them to make sense of it.

Or the book I read before that, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, which is about a woman from Nigeria who moves to America to study, her experiences as an immigrant and as a Black woman who is not African American, the cruelty and casual racism, the crappy arrogant way white Americans view immigrants and Black Americans, but also, it's a love story about a long ago romance with a like-minded man and how they've gone their separate ways and somehow manage to find their way back to each other, in Nigeria. 

Or the book I read before that, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, which was about a despondent girl who regrets most of the decisions she's made in her life, but is given a second chance (actually, she's given a million chances) to try again and again and again, until she gets it right.

I don't have many regrets, but I do appreciate second chances, and aren't we profoundly lucky, those of us who've made it through this thing, the first Global Pandemic since 1918, so far, anyway, slipping our masks off or keeping them on, 

for just a little while longer, mindful of each other and our varying degrees of trauma, our wishes to return to normal, to browse in libraries, to read books

and to share them.

Mercury is in retrograde

and I don't know what that means but it seems bad. Something about the planet appearing to move backwards and maybe that affects relationships? or signing business contracts? This is according to astrologers, so make of it what you will, but how else do you explain

people losing their minds on airplanes, or yesterday when I was first in line at a green light and three cars shot through the red light, or that "doctor" testifying before the Ohio Statehouse saying it was a fact that people who had the Covid vaccine could stick a spoon on their face because now we're all magnetic and she knew this because she saw it on Youtube.

The other day our dog refused to go for a walk, which is so odd, because always, even if you whisper the word (walk) she will come running, but this day, she planted her feet and wouldn't budge. She hadn't been eating, and then she was panting and shivering. 

My husband and I brought her to the veterinary hospital and I was having ptsd, remembering the last time we came to this place with our dying cat, but how kind the people were. They took the freaked out dog from freaked out us and did blood tests and pumped her up with fluids. Nothing physically wrong that they could see. Has there been any recent trauma, they asked.

Well, our daughter and boyfriend moved out a few weeks ago and took their dog with them, but I never thought of our dogs as being friends. Still, who knows what goes on in a dog's head, and then my husband and I went out of town for a week and left her with a stranger, so there's that.

I went to work tired and a man strode into the library without a mask. Which is okay. We have a sign on the door that says Masks Appreciated, but more and more people are ignoring it. Which is okay too. But still, the man seemed to be gearing up for a fight. When will the computers be back, he demanded. When will you have seating? When can we have meetings? 

I was sitting behind plexiglass and I smiled under my mask. We're working on it, I said. 

It was the same thing I told the mom who asked when we'd have toys back in the youth department. I could read the impatience on her mask-less face. We just opened the library a few weeks ago, I said. We'll get there. What I didn't say: Maybe it takes a little time to come out of a global pandemic. 

But I get it.

The masks, the plexiglass, the empty toy room are all outward signs that we just went through something scary. Some of us are struggling with this more than others. IE: losing their minds on airplanes or running red lights or trying to stick metal spoons to their foreheads. 

When I was in California with my son, we were sitting at a red light and he told me his philosophy of red lights, how traffic signals are really the only experience most people have with laws, with the social contract. If we didn't have traffic lights, we'd all just drive straight through. But here we are, stopped, even when there's no traffic going the other way. Most of us follow the rules, 

wear the masks, get the vaccines. We're scared too but we want to do what is right, not just for ourselves, but for other people too. 

The vet sent the dog home with fancy wet canned food and the dog gulped it down and then crawled into bed with us. In the morning I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk and she came running. 

Some days are harder than others

Hi I am Jody and I don't close doors

What I'm talking about are cabinet doors, drawers, the doors to the medicine cabinet, the dresser etc. What happens is I walk into a room, do things that require opening doors and then, don't close them. I've done this unconsciously for years, apparently? and had never even given it a second thought (except for the occasional crack on the head or banged knee) until the movie The Sixth Sense came out

and my husband started walking into rooms where I'd been sitting and would remark: What is this, The Sixth Sense?

(This is only funny if you have seen the movie, so I will quickly catch you up. A little boy is haunted by dead people. They're everywhere, is the famous line. And sometimes, when he's in the kitchen, the dead people will open every cabinet door and drawer, and then the mom will walk in and the kid's just sitting there, with his hands pressed into the table so hard he leaves marks and with an expression on his face that screams, I did not open any of these doors!)

The question that is never specifically answered in this movie is WHY dead people like to open doors and not close them. I can't explain why I seem to open doors and not close them either. I'm not dead, so let's get that one out of the way. Although, it's possible there are dead people living in my house. 

How I found this out was shortly before my husband and moved in, we met the seller and she mentioned casually that two people had died in the upstairs bedroom. This house had a lot of issues that we had known about when we bought it. For example, the dining room ceiling was painted orange and the front and back door had faucets in place of doorknobs, and giant eyes were decal-ed on one of the walls, which made me think of the cover of The Great Gatsby. Also, the house reeked of cigarette smoke and multiple cats' urine. 

My husband and I knew all of this when we bought it and we were sure we could fix it all up (spoiler: we did) but for a moment there, when the seller told me about the dead people, I admit I was a little concerned. But I rallied, and with the help of Google, I solved all of our house problems. 

Thank you Google!

But all the while, I kept, apparently, entering rooms and opening doors and not closing them, a practice that my husband had made peace with, because he rarely mentioned it. Until, this past year when my daughter and her boyfriend were living with us and one day he said something like, 

Do you know you always leave doors open?

And my daughter added, It makes him nervous. 

Which made me wonder if it was time to deal with this problem, and the first step in dealing with a problem is to admit you have a problem. 

The end.