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My sister has arranged for us to house sit for people she knows, people who live in what from the street looks like a non-descript thirties era Annapolis house. They have completely rebuilt the inside of the house, however, filling the creek-side walls with huge windows. The house is on Spa Creek, in a part of town where I did some high school hanging out. To come back here in the winter is immediately to run up against the optimistic melancholy of those years I spent with Ellie, Susan, Kimi, talking about boys and clothes, college and homework... the limited view of the future we had. We were outside a lot, under the trees or in the little storage sheds, garages, and boat houses where no one thought to look for us (or else where no one bothered looking for us because they didn't think we could make enough trouble to undermine our sliding into our underimagined futures).
The overall grey -- the possibility of snow -- contributed then and contributes now to my sense that something is just about to happen as long as I sit quietly and let it.
I know now how much these houses cost, and the distance in value between the house on the creek and the house just on the street; back then, we all just knew each other and the different houses hadn't been so separately fixed up. Dennis and I go walking through the neighborhood, taking the two little dogs for whose exercise we are responsible. We pass the house where, in high school, we mourned Ned's death into the night, a bunch of kids who -- most of us -- would need more than one death to persuade us that time was neither endless nor always remarkable.
Tonight we have dinner with Laurie and John, and those words should have confetti skittling up around them.
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