Owning it.

           Down route 214 from our neighborhood, and across from Lou’s Country Store, where the residents of communities within a mile’s radius get their liquor and Cheetoes, are a number of small businesses.  South River Flooring is in a trailer on a gravel lot.  Watercheck inhabits half of a one story brick office.  The other half rents back hoes.  Next to Watercheck is a shabby red brick house on a quarter acre.  Although I drive by at least twice a day, I have not been able to discern the structure of the family that lives there.  Sometimes there is an old man smoking a cigarette on the porch.  Sometimes there is a punk ass teenager smoking in the yard, preparing to jay walk to Lou’s.  The brick house is one of a line of run down eyesores along Central Avenue.  While the neighborhoods branching off Central Avenue offer homes at a variety of prices, from modest ranch houses, to luxury estates on Cadle Creek and the Rhode River, the houses right along 214 are uniformly decaying.  Many were farm houses before Edgewater became a Baltimore and DC bedroom community, and before 214 evolved from a country road to a two lane thoroughfare. 

            The first year we lived in Edgewater, the red brick house did not decorate for Easter.  Decorating for Easter is not much of a tradition, but some of our neighbors would put an inflatable bunny in the yard, or fly a flag with a purple crocus on it.  There are sometimes one or two “He is Risen” signs.  Easter isn’t a decorating holiday.

            The following year, the red brick house was decked out in inflatable bunnies.  There must have been a hundred bunnies, in pink and blue and yellow, hanging from the trees like Christmas ornaments, and stuck into the ground.  It looked like an amusement park.  In addition to the bunnies, there were at least fifty inflatable Easter eggs of various sizes.  I thought it was curious that someone would put so much effort into decorating for Easter.

            Our neighbor, who knows everything, told us that it was a prank.  I thought it was a funny prank, and wondered if it was friends of the teenage punk, or just a random act of pastel.

            Then, the following year, the bunnies reappeared.  Who is the phantom prankster who covers this house with bunnies?  Is this the same person who puts a rose and a bottle of liquor on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave?  I have another theory.  The infestation of inflatable bunnies started out as a prank.  The brick house found it so cheerful, that it decided to continue the tradition on its own.  Now, the bunnies sprout every year around Easter, just like the tulips.  

Domo

Last night was our last hypnobirthing class.  We met in the lobby of the Clatanoff Pavillion, which is also the labor and delivery waiting room.  There were fifteen people waiting there, chatting.  They seemed to be there together, probably all waiting for the same birth. 

After our guided meditations and birth videos, after we practiced laboring positions, we took our tour of the labor and delivery ward.  The second floor is labor and delivery; the third floor is recovery.

The ward looks like a Comfort Inn and Suits, but with a nursing station and wider doors.  We five stood outside one of the doors, and our teacher explained how the ward was designed, where triage was, and how the staff encourages laboring mothers to walk the halls. 

The large door we were standing by opened.  A boy that looked like a frat boy walked out.  He was wearing madras shorts, flip flops, a white hat, and a Domo tee shirt.  He had scruffy brown hair and flushed cheeks and a big smile.  He could have been strutting into the Tombs with his bros.  As the door shut behind him, he looked at our group and put his fists in the air.  “It’s a boy!” he told us.  He had a few cigars in his hands.  We said congratulations as he strutted toward the ward door to tell his large family.  

Fire!

I had turned off the light around 11:00pm, but I didn’t expect to sleep. The juices digesting the grilled chicken I’d eaten for dinner had backed up into my esophagus, and the Pepcid wasn’t working yet, and I had to pee already, and I’d taken a nap that afternoon. Sleep was at least an hour off, but I was bored with my book, and the dogs and Matt were already snoring, so I closed my eyes and heaved onto my left side with the big pillows tucked up all around me and I tried to lay still and count the baby’s kicks. There should be at least ten in an hour. There were ten in five minutes. She was poking me in the ribs with her little fetus feet and almost making me giggle out loud.

I was just boarding a train of thought about how I’d never seen the movie Alien, but I had seen Space Balls, when the dogs started barking and doing that “woo woo WOOOOO” thing. I thought I’d heard a clatter, but the dogs bark at everything, and at nothing. They woo at an imagined intruder nightly. Yet, when there was a stray dog sitting on our porch last year, they made not a peep. When, on one of our nightly walks, we encountered the chickens, who had escaped from the dirty house down the street and around the corner, the dogs didn’t even notice them. A squirrel on the back fence will give them an aneurism, but an ax wielding murderer gets kisses. We live on a lively street; our neighbors often sit on their front porches at night, smoking menthols and drinking Bud Light, so there are lots of little noises all the time. Most of them are white noise to me, but the dogs have those sensitive ears. Someone probably tossed a beer can into a recycling bin, or toppled a stack of firewood.

Matt uncovered himself and got up and looked out the front window, claiming he heard a siren, but Matt, not unlike the dogs, hears things in his half sleep. Matt says things in his sleep, too, like “I keep blowing the whistle but Flagler keeps running down the field.” Flagler is the elder pug. Matt went out to the living room. He came back in and put his Alabama sweatshirt on. He said that the house down the street had exploded, and that he was going to check it out. I reminded him to put on pants, closed my eyes, and returned my attention to monitoring our alien baby. Matt is prone to exaggeration and overreaction. When we got into that car accident on our way to Disney, we had drifted off the pavement, hit a patch of mud, and he overcompensated by jerking us back on the road. The back of the car went faster than the front, and we did a half a turn, ending up on the other side of the road, trunk facing west in the westbound lane. When the fire truck came, Matt told them we had spun out “at least three or four times.” He believed it, too. As an aside, I thought the more exciting part of that accident was how we clipped a speed limit sign in half. A six foot piece of metal with a big metal square that said 45 on it flew just a few feet past our heads, and as it passed, I dropped my peanut butter smoothie. We could have been decapitated. We have five flashlights in our eight hundred square foot, one floor house. He’ll check to make sure the burners are off and the candles are out five times, even when no one has used the stove that day and we don’t have any candles. It’s just how he is.

Matt went outside to the porch and came back a minute later. The house down the street really was on fire. When I looked out our bedroom window, which faces the street, there were flashing red and white lights and a hose and a pilgrimage of neighbors drifting toward the end of the street.

There are three houses between us and the on-fire house. Jim is right next to us. He allegedly lives with his mother, although I’ve never seen her, and doesn’t seem to have a job, although he is always working on his car or a home improvement project. I tend to think he’s a serial killer, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. Next to Jim, there’s a couple with children. The night of the fire, I found out the couple’s names are Jenn and Eric. He does something blue collar, and she runs a doll and dollhouse business. The next house I don’t know about, I think they were on vacation. Then there was the house that exploded.

Shannon is our sometimes-next-door- neighbor on our other side. She and her two kids have been staying with Kelly, her mom, since she (Shannon) and her husband broke up. Sometimes she stays with her boyfriend. Shannon confirmed that something had exploded. Shannon and Kelly were drinking blush wine on the porch when it happened. Now, there was an explosion and sirens, and I hadn't heard either of them, and I was wide awake. Maybe I should reconsider the sensitivity of my family’s hearing, and start to consider that my own is deficient. Shannon said the guy didn't have gas or oil heat. According to Shannon, he woke up because he was choking on smoke. He ran out of the house in just his boxers, no shirt, no shoes. Shannon gave him pants, shoes, and a sweatshirt. His wife and son were not home, he left his cell in the house, and he didn't know their numbers, so he was sitting in Eric and Jenn’s house, while they were on the street drinking whatever they were drinking out of matching insulated cups. The cups were those clear plastic kind with two layers, and between the two layers was a logo for the dollhouse business.

There was one firetruck and one fire-van on the street. The hose stretched all the way to Cadle Creek, which is four blocks away, on the other side of 214. Another firetruck blocked 214 and the hose that stretched across the four blocks. Now, there is a pond immediately adjacent to the house that was on fire, and another pond just two blocks to the south. Maybe there was a reason why the firefighters went all the way to Cadle for water, but the four-block stretch of hose made everyone question the fire department’s competence. It was the primary topic of chatter among the gallery for at least two to three minutes.

So, Eric and Jenna from two doors down are out there sipping from their insulated cups with straws. Shannon has her glass of Chablis and ice. Someone was drinking whisky, I could smell it. The woman who runs My Girl Charters lives a block in the other direction, and she brought her three month old puppy, a chow retriever mix, who is going to be huge. You can tell because he has big paws. It was like a midnight block party barbeque. The smoke was still billowing out of the house, but the flames stopped shooting out of the roof. Some of the tall trees near the house had also been on fire, but they were put out first, so they wouldn’t set the neighbors and the state park ablaze, too. The front entrance area was still burning; you could see that through the front door. It didn’t seem too bad, and I, for the millionth time in my life, wished for an invisibility cloak so I could go check it out for myself. I’m certain I would have been safe. I took a few steps forward and bobbed my head back and forth like a chicken to get a better angel, but then we were all shooed further back up the street by a firefighter.

I was wearing my flip flops because of my swollen feet, but it was about forty degrees and wet out there. The snow was still melting, and there were rivers of icy water and dirt and salt streaming toward the pond. It was probably bad for the bay that we put all those chemicals on our walks and streets, but we can’t be falling down. The salt burned my feet, like it burned our dogs’ paws when we had taken them out during the blizzards. I didn’t want to miss the gossip about the cause of the fire or the extent of the destruction, but, after twenty minutes on the street, I figured I had gotten all the information I would get that night. I went back inside and dried my feet and put on socks. The dogs and I and the baby in my belly tucked up together on our couch, and listened hopefully for the burning house’s collapse.