Day 24. Annette.

They said she had lived there since the 40s. They said she had heartbreak, loneliness. They said that her family left; she stayed. They said nothing had changed since then. Her handkerchief got a little more ragged at the edges, a few teeth were lost by the wayside. They said lights never went on at the house on the corner. They said her only food was garnered from bartering fruit from house to house.

Me, I waved from the window, answered her occasional doorbell ring, accompanied as it always was by a cheery "it's me! annette!" As if that voice were commonplace, as if we could have mistaken those bright but greying eyes savoring whatever there was to take in. the blemishes on our meyer lemons were no more than beauty marks to annette. Once, when i was thirteen, she told me she envied my braces, told me how gleaming and strong my teeth would be, and suddenly i didn't mind the embarrassing way food lodged in between the wires.
Once, she told my dad about how she walked to City Hall, miles and miles of streets with new asphalt and new signs and new people who didn't understand that no, she didn't want to email in her paperwork.

It can't have been an easy life, but to my eyes it seemed happy. annette kept a yard of fruit trees and glass bottles, maybe a shopping cart, and these served as bare necessities. They said when they found her she was curled into a tiny ball, buried under years of carefully hoarded treasures. this newspaper would prevent her from being seen. towards the end, she feared being dragged away. the neighbors were complaining about the lawn and the broken windows weren't bringing up property values, and men came to tear up the peach tree sprawling, unpruned but loved.

i have the feeling annette died with the peach tree. without decorum. without consent.
for awhile, neighbors from all over left flowers in her yard, cut nice ones and plucked rough ones. today there was a bulldozer, post destruction.
i climbed up. touched the stick shift.
a braver girl, a girl who walked from house to house picking fruit and bringing cans in and having conversations would have torn it out bareclawed.
A braver girl would have hauled the torn up remains of wood and metal strewn in the falling house into the seat, to slow down the workers.
I went numb and kept walking.