Here in the Commune

In 1970, when everyone else my age was still scraping the mud off their ankles from Woodstock
and being way cool with alternate lifestyles, I was delivering my first born and then following my husband from Fort Benning to Fort Gordon to Fort Monmouth to Fort Ord. We were the antithesis of cool. We didn’t even get a taste of communal living by being housed on base, although we did live in a succession of less and less creepy apartments.

          Upon discharge, and after the trek back to Massachusetts, we bought our first house, where if one of the kids decided to bounce a tennis ball incessantly against his bedroom wall, he was only shredding the nerves of immediate family, not some captive audience next door.         

Then we moved outside of the city, onto a dead-end street with only two other homes. With an acre of woods in back of our house I can wander around au natural in my backyard if the spirit moves me. Fortunately for the sensibilities of our deer and wild turkey population, I’ve never had the urge to do so. Our neighbors are the best kind – there when you need them, invisible when you don’t.

          I thought of this today here in Florida as I stepped out of the bathroom in my underwear just as a man on a lawnmower chugged by our bedroom window, twenty feet away. I keep forgetting that I’m not back home in the woods, where the only reason to close the curtains is to prevent the relentlessly perky June sun from lasering my eyelids at 6:30 a.m.

          I’d been up for a while, since whoever is upstairs from us begins every day by dragging what must be cast-iron chairs back and forth promptly at 6:58 every morning. Since this is followed by rapid footsteps back and forth, my profiling skills tell me the owner of those feet is likely younger than the typical Florida demographic of 65 and older. Then there’s the bouncebouncebounce-bounce  bounce     bounce        bounce  sound that I hear periodically. Game of fetch? Rubber ball? And why don’t I hear skittering feet?

          Here in our communal bunker of cement and steel, at least other sounds never drift over or down from the neighbors – no televisions, music, or conversations – but anything remotely percussive is shared by all. 

          By the way, the lawnmower and its rider passed, and I dodged into a dark corner and threw on a robe. With curlers in my hair as a feeble defense against the day’s impending humidity, I went out to the lanai (translation, porch) to paint my toenails. 

     I had just folded myself into a modified lotus position, giving me access to my left foot, when I looked up to see a man in a straw hat weedwhacking the edges outside of our screen, an arm’s length away.