My Old Neighborhood

Outside the Natural History Museum, brown leaf prints on the sidewalk. Ghost leaves, a suggestion, a representation. More mark than I left on this part of the city, although I walked these streets every day for more than two years.

Even the Dunkin Donuts where I bought my coffee every day, where huge-breasted Kevina knew what I wanted and smiled when she handed it to me, even the Dunkin has been ousted from its corner spot, the windows brown-papered, the building waiting for something new to move in, take its place.

Someone else lives in our tiny apartment, stands on the balcony and looks down at the street below, at me seeing the leaf prints. Does anyone else notice them? Does the new resident spend as much time as I did watching the street?

Things change fast here. Not like at home, where nothing ever seems to disappear. Old clothes are passed around within a family, and then from friend to friend, and then maybe are sold in a yard sale, and then maybe reappear in a secondhand store. Ancient barns are left to their own devices, they and the weather decide whether they will stand or fall. People are remembered in stories, connections, the things they made and said and did.

No time to get this exactly right, figure out what I'm getting at. But there's something I'm missing, some kind of mattering, roots running deep through sidewalks to cobblestones, to bricks and rocks. Trees that will grow leaves and drop them and grow some more. It's here, as well as there, I know it is, but I'm not a part of it yet.