The luminescent dial of my watch has ceased to glow.  Like me, it’s been away from light too long.  The power cut off hours ago, just bam, gone, elevator dead in the air.  It was raining when I arrived, and windy, but it didn’t seem that bad.  The news always makes storms seem apocalyptic, then everybody rushes out to buy bread and bottled water.  God I wish I had some.

Maybe a whole day so far?   I can’t be sure without the watch, or the phone somewhere up on my desk.  At least this is the freight elevator.  I can lay down and I am, but sleep won’t come.  No emergency phone here.   Just buttons.

The coffee I carried was mostly empty already.  I finished it many hours ago.  Cup’s full again.  I won’t be the guy who does that on the elevator.  That’s the kind of water cooler stuff a person doesn’t live down.

And I hate this costume.  I can’t lay down in it.  Three steps back and forth, four steps back to front where my fingers scrabble for the hundredth time at the narrow slit between metal doors.   The rubber sword isn’t going in either. I pulled the Velcro on the plastic armor and I’m laying here in long johns.  It’s damned cold.

Why I just had to have the cell phone left at my work station I don’t know.  Concerns about missed messages seem incredibly stupid right now.  I certainly won’t be taking any pictures of co-workers in costume at the party.  On the other hand, two more minutes of electricity and that particular chunk of plastic could have been in my hands, ringing every number in my list.

No matter which direction I put my body on the floor, I can reach a wall with finger or toe.  I know how big this room is.  This is my daily commute in the building since my parking space is just off the warehouse side.  I’m not really a big fan of the regular elevator.

When they built this place, it seems like they were shooting for a maximum capacity of maybe four people on the elevator customers and vendors use.  Of course in the morning, people rushing to be on time push that up to seven or eight.  Not my scene at all.  Rickety.

Though I can touch the walls, I long to push them back away from me.  It’s black as sin in here, and smaller by the second.  I smell my coffee breath, reminding myself for the hundredth time that this stupid box is not some hermetically sealed specimen jar.  My stomach moans.

Since they put in the alarm and key code pad, the guard service got fired, and in this storm, no way anyone is coming to the building until eight Monday morning.  Just won’t happen.  I’m now actually fondling the St. Christopher medal hanging on my neck.  Right now, I’d travel to a war zone to leave this black hole.

First came trapping snow, closing both roads and schools.  I’m not sure about people working, shopping or any of that.  Everyone stayed in. There was fighting and boredom, books, board games and television. Feet and feet of snow, then small rain to melt things back.  The temperature dropped at dark just as quickly as the snow.

With the freezing wet, snow slid and dropped loud as thunder into great piles avalanched off a slate roof.  Some first floor windows in back allowed filtered light through the drifts and droppings next morning.

I rose early.  The yard was encrusted, glistening, sealed in the frozen remains of the night before.  Trees spouted like muddy fountains caught mid spray, the heaviest boughs brought to ground by the weight, stuck to earth in unnatural curls.

I’d beaten my siblings to the yard, the bird-less stillness broken only by grating plows scraping in the distance.  Our street was pretty deep. Nothing had  dented the surface of the little world of our driveway and yard.

Sliding slowly, skating really, I reached the plow furrow left at the roadside edge of the yard the day before.  Shallow breath pluming the air, I crossed the distance without breaking the crust.  My arms floated at my sides, balancing me, as if I were walking a tight rope.

Back at the porch door, I looked to see if there had been any spot, even small, where I’d broken the ice in my travel.  Nothing.  I’d heard creaks and groans, shifting my steps.

When the other kids came out, they stomped shapes and words into the snow and ice. They rolled in great looping arcs and up-ended sheets of ice large as they could lift, only to push them aside and scatter them to slush.

The sun warmed the earth and the icicles grew from eaves.  Within hours, our yard grew chaotic, like a dot-to-dot puzzle of a rain cloud.

More storms came as years passed in that house, but never one quite so bad.  By the next big one, I was far too heavy to leave no mark on the slick surface of the world, and too old to try.

It’s perfect.  Two towns away, next county even, and we go to the harvest fair.   Just us, to walk around.  We play games and Alan knocks the bottle over with his second softball and gets me the dog. I like dogs, but can’t keep a real one at home. It takes me thirteen darts to pop a balloon for his prize.

We eat candy apples, kicking straw, then walk to the ferris wheel, wandering together, laughing, talking.  No way I’m going on that wheel.  We can’t, two men.  I hate heights.  It spins around, rainbow neon lights the spokes.  Alan pulls the belt loop at the small of my back, yanking me off balance, laughing through his Hollywood sunglasses and smoke.  He buys cheap cigars, he doesn’t care, and I don’t either because whatever kind, his mouth still taste like ashes.

So he sneaks one big jerk and I step right back into some kid’s dropped vanilla cone.  My good shoes too, for church with ma.  He laughs, steadies me and who’s walking right up but Jack Mulvaney and his wife. She’s towing kids, boy and a girl, one to each hand as Jack wobbles up with his paper cup of beer.  He gabs with Alan about a new defense contract at the plant. Frank Mulvaney’s a foreman.  My foreman.  An engineer, Alan knows more about the job.  I work the line.  Then Jack says it, asks what us boys are doing at the fair.  He’s not slurring, yet.  I hope his wife drives.

Boys?  What’s that mean?  Behind dark glasses Alan laughs, puffing, smiling at the kids.  He asks their names, but doesn’t answer Jack’s question.  The kids don’t meet my eye when I aim a frozen smile their way.  I don’t hear the names because then Alan tells Jack about our dates, the “girls”, circling above.  He points up, even. It spins haltingly now, stopping every half minute to empty a carriage and load more fools. Alan invents Elaine and Lottie.  He thinks fast.  Lies like my father did.

Jack’s kids tug at the wife’s hands, each wanting some different shiny, sugary thing.  Or all of them.  She whispers to Jack.  Alan explains, again–we’re waiting for our girls, nodding at the bright wheel.  More talk as Jack and his family muster and start to move in zig-zag pattern with the children’s different desires.  Or maybe it’s Jack’s beer making their path so raggedy.  The wheel stops again.  Riders emerge, others enter.

Jack’s still glancing back, talking too loud.  His wife dithers with the kids. The next-to-last car empties.  The wheel spins counter clock-wise.  Last carriage.  The kids look back too, wide-eyed, maybe at their father’s hoarse jokes.  Jack calls his brother a moron.  The wheel spins like for roulette.  No ball will drop and no girls are coming out.  At least not Lottie and Elaine.  Alan’s a gambler.  Only those distracted kids and their drunken dad decide whether we lose it all, or walk away even tonight.

Whatever it was, it traced a long, walking-speed arc whose nadir occurred just a few feet above and to the left of the bricked chimney of the built-in grill on my parents’ back patio.  I was on the white wicker couch in the glassed-in room one step up from the patio.  My eyes absently scanned the night sky while I spoke with Iris on the telephone.  I must have called moments after arriving home and dropping to the thin green cushion of the couch. She doesn’t remember the conversation, how it ended or my reaction to the UFO sighting, but I mostly do.  Beyond a vague cigar shape, and series of colored lights running in parallel down its length, no description is available.  I don’t know which colors.  I must have dropped the phone. I ran into the depths of the house.

I ended up in the kitchen with my family, twitching and babbling.  Whatever I did, my parents reacted by calling the police. Nothing came of this effort, other than my own sense that, whatever actually happened, the sighting went unquestioned.  My family was taking it, and me, seriously.  One of my sisters was there, I don’t know which.  My older brothers were not, and the youngest two were sleeping.  I think.  Beyond a lack of sleep and my forehead pressed to a window, not much else about the rest of that evening comes to mind.

As time passed, my UFO sighting evolved from news to embarrassment.  The revelation, always made by a friend or sibling, only served to isolate me, to make me seem the credulous sort I choose not to be. To think of it now astounds me.  A tired teenaged mind, in intense conversation, intent on connection–had it made its own pictures, or just caused some different set of eyes to open and look?

Neither explanation suffices, and perhaps both simply say the same thing with different words.  I remember as I write the crash of a single engine plane into a pond no more than a mile from the telephone I dropped in panic.  No survivors.  Just a couple of summers earlier it had happened.  My brothers and I had heard the plane’s engines, unusually loud for the area, but no sound of a crash.  The story was in the paper two day later.  People died.

As ever, I’d taken the route through the woods behind her house leaving that night.  That way was quickest, and if you knew what you were doing, presented no major obstacles other than perhaps unseen poison ivy.  I didn’t carry a flashlight.  I knew those trees and rocks.  We’d first met in those woods, she and I.  We yelled hello from some distance, she on the ground on her trip through the trees, I in the the highest limb a fourteen year old can talk himself into reaching. My school friend, Iris’ next door neighbor, had climbed with me into a favorite tree.

Jimmy and I smoked two White Owl cigars up in the branches that afternoon.  Getting tobacco must have been much easier for teens in the early eighties.  At least once, we’d ridden our bikes down the way to buy cigarettes for one of his troubled twin sisters.  We considered our smoking a celebration of sorts, and it surely was.  My mother had just told us, my siblings and me, that she was pregnant with a sixth child.  The cigars represented our mannish reaction to such news, with just a dash of bad boy thrown in.  We hid to smoke them, after all, far up a skinny trunk instead of in the elevated fort in Jimmy’s backyard.

My first kiss, it was with Iris, happened behind a house too, in Jimmy’s back yard, also not in the fort but on the grass below the elevated porch.  Later, at some break-off point in our sometimes troubled teen relationship, I’d climbed alone to watch the houses.  Her house.  It was no great amount of extra effort to go there–I had to walk home a few miles from my stop on the bus route home from Catholic high school–right next to her neighborhood.  I don’t remember seeing anything but a house I had to assume was empty.  I did this more than once.  I went back to public school sophomore year.  Iris and a I reconnected.  We broke again later, somehow.

The wood lot I’d trudged so many times isn’t anymore.  It had chased alongside the back fences and borders of the yards all the way down Iris and Jimmy’s side of the street.  We were not the only players there–there were plywood forts with moldy cushions and stone-built fire pits to be found here and there.  Broken bottles and bald tires, though no major appliances I can recall, and I would.  Places of forbidden fun for kids just a bit older had sprouted and crumbled like mushrooms.  All abandoned in our years, spray painted with band names, mottoes and crudely fashioned marijuana leafs.

Jimmy and I left our marks too, pocket knife-carved into trunks at eye level.  Curses and cheers, forbidden words, initials plus initials–the unutterable and assumed facts of our schoolyard hours.  Now, dozens of homes are clustered on that formerly wooded acreage, each to its own spot on a desirable cul de sac.  There’ll be no more cut-throughs on that ground, that’s trespassing, and my smoking tree is surely long gone.  E unibus plurum. Backyards, swing sets and shrubbery for all.  At a price.  There is always great expense with such things, and loss.

In my time, I’m sure I wore a trail through those woods, walking between houses. Sometimes my dead grandmother’s dog followed me from home, almost all of the way to Iris’ house.  At least he did until my father got rid of him for pissing on the rugs.  At some point, I’d turn to look for little Sam, and he’d no longer be panting along behind me.  Somehow, when I got home again, he’d be there.  At least until my father sent him off for good.  Sam and Daisy, our other dog, had gotten on well.  Daisy roamed just like Sam had. Leash laws, too, saw more lax enforcement back then.  In any case, Daisy proved less skilled in making it home.  The stain she left in the street when hit by a garbage truck remained visible until a repaving several years after her death.

Soon after that spot was covered, Iris and I were older, driving, still kissing, and progressing to new ways for me to pretend mannishness.  School, then lawn cutting in summer and leaf clean up in fall, pulling and pushing the smoking monsters that make suburban life so manageable.  Cut them in half where they stand, or wait for them to fall on their own, then blow them into piles and toss over the nearest stone wall.  The backyard at my house became a work site, cutting and gathering leaves green and brown, or scraping and painting the shed.  I buried a mouse back there too, sometime in middle school, between the roots of a tree growing next to the stone wall.  Not deep.  I’d found the body in a trap in the basement. Tools:  gloves, shovel and shoe box.  And the mouse.

We broke up, Iris and I, new friends, different schools, lives and directions.  Immaturity.  High school does that to its students.  Then college, and parents who shift and downsize, different cities and studies.  Over the next years, my backyard shifted from quadrangle, to housing complex to heavy machinery warehouse to ten feet of lawn, edged with brambley chaos behind someone else’s home and yard.  All our small squares of enforced order.

I cut my own grass for the first time, raking and pulling weeds because I wanted to, all on my own.  One morning in that first back yard of my very own, I slapped the thighs of my pants with each hand, removing dust.  I flung my left hand out and my wedding ring kept going.  I got a metal detector, crawled on my knees for hours, rooting in piles of leafy debris.  Perhaps a bird or other animal had found it, I thought.  I did not.  It didn’t seem ominous at the time.  I replaced it cheaply.  It wasn’t the last one I lost.

More than thirty years, but just two divorces later, Iris and I now share a back yard.  We’d talked and visited in those years between.  At times often, but more often far between. Before leaving for a life in Florida, I’d been to Iris and her husband’s home for a back yard barbecue.  Her first child, a son, was already building in her that day.  I didn’t stay long, and didn’t see her again for some fourteen years.  We traced different paths through the woods for a long time.  The first time I saw her son, he was already in high school himself, old enough for his own smoking tree.  He was smarter, though.  He dug a hole in their back woods as a boy, she told me, deep and imposing and still yawning in the earth.  Just because.  He is an environmental science major now, soon to graduate back into the woods.

Our backyard here at this home that we share with her two shared-custody dogs has a small fenced area just for them.  At her married house, they’d been fenced by electronic collars, with three acres to roam. That is not possible here for us, and not now.  About seventy five percent of our yard remains essentially unused by us.  It is travelled only by the lawn crew our landlord retains.

I see one of their heads passing from frame to frame in the lowest level of panes in the kitchen windows as the man seems to hover by on his riding mower.  We must keep the dogs in then, and the balls, toys, bones and antlers will already have been piled for safety on the back porch.  Back yard for us is porch, two doors, a fence and a grassy spot in a roughly rhomboid shape.  We lay on blankets and toss balls to the dogs.  We clean up their piles and hide in the hollow of the land between walls and fences. Ours.

When the dogs go out for a last time at night, we often join them.  Sit on the grass and stare at the stars–it is good for you.  If the wind is right and the traffic light, the bells of Saint Francis down the way alert us to the hour.  Often, we take that chance to piss in the grass with the dogs–we’re out there anyway. Once, I leaked on the fence, and the male, Kota, came along right behind me, lifting his leg in just the same spot.  I didn’t mind the over-ride, both Kota and Suki love me, and Iris.  Our turf.  We all mark it in some way.

Iris misses the privacy she’d known in her old yard for twenty five years.  Privacy is a precious commodity here.  Everywhere.  I can’t blame her, used as I am to neighborhoods where notes could be tossed from window to window by next door neighbors.  From my porch seat, I can count nineteen houses, six sheds, three each of American flags flying and gardens growing, and two clotheslines I’ve never seen filled.

There are any number of back yards, side yards, grills and cars to be seen.  One of the clothes lines is in our own rented yard, out in the no-man’s land traversed only by landscapers. Many trees dead or dying are also visible from my padded wire chair. The rabbits and squirrels rival each other for numbers in the neighborhood, and each kind drives the dogs wild with desire.  None of those animals joins our dogs in the fenced part of the yard, but that doesn’t stop the yearning and yelps.  The cooling weather makes the squirrels fight and scurry on the trunks of trees.  We saw one fall some fifteen feet, only to scale the tree again.  Hot pursuit.

One afternoon, we shared our backyard time with the dogs–a blanket, books and sweating jars of iced water to quench our sweaty selves.  I noticed first, I don’t know why, that Kota was very attentive to one corner of the fenced yard.  From then, when I said, “They’ve got an animal,”, things happened very quickly.  A groundhog in Kota’s mouth caused a quick cry from Iris–“No!”.  With a snap of his neck, Kota broke the groundhog’s back and dropped it.  Suki took over, carrying the corpse from place to place in her fenced-in space. Periodically, she’d drop the body, poking it with her nose or flipping it gently with her mouth.  Her contentment at simply being next to it was clear.  She’s hunted vermin over acres and wood piles for most of her life.  Here was a trophy indeed.

Later, we cleaned a bit of the blood off her foreleg.  The blood on the grass we left.  It was high summer and hot, and after a time, we took the body in two plastic bags and placed it in the trunk of my car.  We hoped to avoid both mess and stink, but to allow the dogs some joy in the kill and the teamwork.  Clearly, groundhogs have both poor sight and unexceptional sense of smell.  The animal had walked right into it.  I’m a childless man, and the feeling I’d had, watching her proudly prance with prey in her mouth, may be as close as I come to some of those feelings dads have.  I know that sounds terrible, maybe.  She’s a terrier, he’s a hound.  Made for that.  I dropped the heavy double lined bag into the outdoor bin at a fast food place.  They empty those daily.  At home, I don’t do that.  There was a thud.

We hear the church chimes, of course, traffic and the irregular and curiously bovine bellow of the volunteer fire alert system.  I can smell cigarettes being smoked three doors down.  Two new homes have grown up this summer season, with all of the attendant trucks and clamor, seven a.m. start time.  There are children, too, of course.  And dogs and birds and motorcycles and arguments and danger.  Death, too.  Since we moved in, our dark nights have been lit by police or ambulance lights some six times.  In every case, I think the relevant parties were removed from their homes by ambulance rather than police cruiser, but for each of us, the events were a bit unnerving, as if we’d moved to some stealth equivalent of Love Canal.

For three nights running, those swirling lights arrived at the house facing ours across the street at our front yard.  There is no information available for nights one and two, but the middle child’s hip-to-ankle cast explained number three.  For the next few weeks, she got pushed on her new wheel chair through the front yard as her siblings played, her parents tinkered and their cats stalked the shrubs and side yard.  We knew all of the children’s names within minutes of closing the front door on the movers and confronting our stacks of stuff.  Though it took a bit longer to learn the names of the parents, we soon did so, as this was a family who quite literally lived in the front yard of their home.

Each parent toots the car horn twice upon both departure and arrival, so we have some sense of the schedules they keep.  Mostly they seem happy, busy, healthy, but it’s difficult to escape the sense we know them all too well.  Effectively, they’ve moved their backyard into the front.  It is a cacophony of colored molded plastic, many wheeled vehicles, swing sets, several slides and children, children, children–resident and visiting.  I’m sure there’d be some kind of pool there right now if both zoning and budget allowed it.  For us, sitting on the front steps watching it unfold became almost better than television.  Reality programming, indeed.

Some of the available dialogue was muffled, and much of the expository stuff took place off stage, but there was drama nonetheless.  Curious use of blowers and saws after ten p.m. are not unusual, nor are late night flashlit car cleanings and chore completions.  It was not until yesterday that I took the opportunity of their unusually empty house to discover why they had flipped the script on front and back in terms of living space.  I walked up the little side street and saw their smallish actual back yard.  A large, screened and elevated trampoline absolutely dominates the tiny space.  I can say for sure the kids don’t get a lot of use of it, and I am not sure what the winter will bring in terms of yard life.  I look forward to snowball fights, many snow people and small igloos.

The only other near neighbor, the one on whose fence I piss, borders our dog play place.  We’ve met them, and their pet bird.  We stopped and chatted several times.  Nice folks, retired but busy. Their pool is the only one in the neighborhood, as far as I can tell, but it isn’t heavily used.  I think it was about six or seven weeks total that it was even uncovered this season.  Our talk makes me believe that even this duration is just for the the grandkids’ sake.  Liability concerns seem far more pressing to the owners.

As per the law, their yard is secured against unwelcome swimmers in a most complete manner.  Each time a car enters or leaves, a gate must be opened and closed.  The driveway of the home, the entry gate and the pool are all in what can only be called the back yard.  Their front yard, however, is, like our back, a no-man’s land.  The gate leading to the front door is secured with a pad lock.  I hope only that the grand kid’s aren’t invited or allowed to use the swing hanging from one of those dead trees one will find in the side yard.  Front and back are slippery terms when discussing yards in this neighborhood.  We are forced to wonder on which street they actually “live”.

I often watch two older men in their yards, tending the grass, cultivating gardens, hanging new fence or tinkering inscrutably in sheds whose darkness obscures all activity from my prying eyes.  Each man, neighbor to the other, has one of those three USA flags and each locks his shed daily, protecting the mowers they push carefully across their grounds. Neither man wears a shirt while at work, and I have never seen them speak, to each other, to anyone.  I’m not sure that they haven’t arranged a schedule so that only one is out working at a time.  They have so much more than a border in common, I think from my comfortable, anonymous distant perch.  But then, I just moved in.

We’ll stay here a few years, we think.  Time to plot a move, for her daughter to finish college, to let family matters shake out at a comfortable distance.  We walk the dogs when they want to, when they tire of the confinement of the fence.  Next year, maybe we’ll buy a grill and hang some clothes on the line.  Almost four months here, and we are just starting to know it as home, to feel that. In some sense, we’ll never fit long term–we are past kids, before retirement and just renters.

We stood on the back porch last week, no man’s land already in the shadows of a setting sun.  We talked of the friends we hope to make, where we are and will end.  I’ve never had that talk with anyone.  It was lovely and true. Hot dogs spitting on the coals, or shitting in the still dry grass of late summer drought–back yards are these things.  Deaths and celebration, and so many things we’ll neither understand nor explain though we’ll try, backyard is more idea than location.  I love it there.  Here.