Dead Letter Department #36

(did you miss Dead Letter Department #35? read about foreshortened futures & ice cream here!)

weather report

When I moved into this house, it had a rickety fence of peeling white slats and a row of old apple trees next door. Across the street, the elderly neighbors had the biggest field of dahlias I’d ever seen, & in the summer he’d sell them for three dollars, huge firecracker explosions of color shoved into old milk cartons & plastic jugs. I bought them all the time, to have at home and when I was going somewhere—they were the perfect gift for a host. The strip of garden outside the fence of the corner house started as a memorial shrine to a family that died in a fire, but had become overgrown & neglected as the memory faded until it was nothing but an overenthusiastic English ivy crawling up the light post & a sad shrub.

The dahlia gardener put a manufactured home down in the field for his daughter, but he kept growing flowers behind it until he couldn’t anymore. Someone farther down the road took up the mantle—the flowers are five dollars now instead of three, they use glass jars instead of plastic jugs, but they’re still very beautiful. I miss the old hand-painted signs on the road telling people to stop for dahlias, I miss the apples dropping over the fence & my dog who used to eat them.

We had a shitty neighbor with a loud little dog & then a good neighbor with quiet big dogs, & a couple that I tried not to learn too much about because I could tell I wouldn’t want to know the answer & I wanted to keep hold on the liking of them I had left. Marie sold the lots on both sides of her house, so the apple trees got torn out, although they managed to keep the old evergreen grove in the back. I run into one of the families who built at a lot of the protests I go to, and the other had kids that are growing up in what I still think of as the new house: two whole, entire people who have never known a world where that house didn’t exist. Last Easter the kids hid plastic eggs stuffed with candy all over the front yard for & put out a sign telling us all to take one in that extremely excellent little kid handwriting.

Now my neighbor on the other side—a good one, probably the best since I’ve moved in—is building a home for her daughter, an ADU where the driveway used to be. At the moment, it’s a huge pit with rickety-looking lumber framework gesturing at where the walls will be. The construction has often sounded as though it is happening essentially right inside my bedroom, & has gone on (& will go on) for months & months past what was expected. They kept unearthing huge chunks of rock, “River rock,” she told me, from the creek bed moving over the years, and she’s scattering it around her garden in a very pleasing way.

When I moved here, it was pretty easy to find quiet outdoor spots, isolated beaches, long stretches of trail with no one on them. Now, the trailheads are packed every nice day, & even my out-of-town swim spot had a few fisherman when I went on Friday morning. I’ve never lived somewhere long enough to watch it change before. Sometimes it feels like all the versions of the town I used to know are still there underneath, just one thin layer of time down from where I’m standing.

It’s hard not to want to things to stay exactly the way they were when I got here, but cities don’t do that. “The ideal form of your neighborhood,” someone wrote recently in a local forum (I’m paraphrasing here), “is not the shape it held when you moved in. Your neighborhood changed before you got there, it is changing now, it will continue to change long after you’re gone.”

There used to be apple trees & dahlias—now there are little kids who sell girl scout cookies & write thank you notes to my mom, & a tiny free library where I take all my old copies of Vogue & find alarmingly annotated history books, & a soon-to-be blacksmith shop going in next door. The chiropractor is turning into a restaurant (Thai iced tea in walking distance is going to be a revelation). There’s a banh mi food truck in the 76 station parking lot, right across from all the new apartment buildings.

I’m trying to learn to love what’s here.

park evaluation board

My city has 44 parks. 44! I’ve only been to like 10, which is frankly embarrassing, & I’m going to rectify it. The first stop on our parks tour is the Cornwall Rose Garden, which isn’t even counted on that list of 44 because it’s in relatively close proximity to Cornwall Park proper. It’s also about five minutes from my house & I’d literally never walked around in it until the other day, when I realized my roses were starting to recover from the unnecessarily aggressive spring pruning I’d given them (I went into sort of a fugue clipping state & emerged to find the whole waste bin full & a corner of the garden largely denuded) & that it might be a good time to see summer flowers.

It is an odd & wonderful little place, about a lot and a half’s worth of rolling green grass & dozens of rose specimens, each labeled with a very informative plaque about the type of awards the rose in question has won & other information that I don’t remember because it meant absolutely nothing to me & therefore slid smoothly right out of my brain. I shoved my face into a bunch of blooms & thought about Hilary Mantel describing Henry VIII as smelling like roses & money, & remembered watering the roses in our not-yet drought afflicted California garden for my dad. I tried to take some pictures for you but they were terrible so here’s the sundial instead.

park count: .5, since it’s not a full park/44
park judgement: aromatic AF

one good thing

It’s peach season. You can buy them before they’re ripe—in fact, it’s probably better to so they don’t roll around in the trunk & whack against the door frame on the way in to end up a bruised & disappointing mess. Pick fruit that’s round & whole & firm, with good strong peachy color, & leave it on your counter for a couple days in a pretty bowl until it gives a little bit when you apply an inquiring fingertip. Slice into yogurt, serve next to brie, or just rinse sloppily & eat outside so you can hose your sticky hands off & huck the woody pit into the grass. It tastes like the richness of the season before it ends, the brief but fervent belief of eternal blue skies.

If you asked for a postcard, I’m dropping it in the mail this week. It was super fun picking out cards & quotes for people & I’m definitely going to do it again sometime soon so send your address to departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com if you want to get on that list. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may your peaches make it into the kitchen entirely intact.