Sidewalks uprooted
We walked to school every morning over uprooted sidewalks. They were cracked and crumbling like old bread, hard and grey with age but breaking apart nonetheless. With our half-sized stride, it took us 20 minutes to arrive at the school house and line up in our rows where we would separate, she with the fourth graders and me with the third. We wouldn’t see each other again until after school. If we did happen to catch a glance, we pretended not to see.
On our walk home, we traversed the sidewalk and wove our arms together in a tangle and sang the songs we both knew. The changing seasons we noticed in fits and starts, a sudden gasp and crunch crunch crunch of walking through the piles of leaves that had fallen and obscured the path. At times, wading through the dry leaves of varying shades of brown, red and yellow we would almost trip and fall on the craggy topography of the sidewalk hidden beneath, even though we climbed those slopes daily.
And then we would come to the cold when our layers of clothes and the fast pace of our walk wasn't enough. The blue sky of winter seemed to threaten through the arthritic gnarl of tree limbs. Frost would coat the lawns white and render each blade of grass like a miniature spear, which crunched as cereal beneath our feet.
We liked to leave traces of ourselves there, a trembling pattern of footfalls in the grass. On our way back from school, we tried to find the broken shards of our passing. We never looked closely enough.
The spring would come, seeming colder than the winter, except for the plants shooting off tender green and the beginnings of flowers on the lengthening branches.
The trees grew skyward as if nothing could stop their ascension, the green returning and our walks twice daily was hardly enough to take it all in.
The street suffered from the subtle undulations and the residents complained of the tree roots traveling into their septic systems and plumbing. We would miss their shade and leaves larger than any hands we had ever seen, and the birds nesting, taking one twig at a time to build their homes. We would miss their shade when they were gone and how lonely the sidewalk would be, uprooted for nothing.
On our walk home, we traversed the sidewalk and wove our arms together in a tangle and sang the songs we both knew. The changing seasons we noticed in fits and starts, a sudden gasp and crunch crunch crunch of walking through the piles of leaves that had fallen and obscured the path. At times, wading through the dry leaves of varying shades of brown, red and yellow we would almost trip and fall on the craggy topography of the sidewalk hidden beneath, even though we climbed those slopes daily.
And then we would come to the cold when our layers of clothes and the fast pace of our walk wasn't enough. The blue sky of winter seemed to threaten through the arthritic gnarl of tree limbs. Frost would coat the lawns white and render each blade of grass like a miniature spear, which crunched as cereal beneath our feet.
We liked to leave traces of ourselves there, a trembling pattern of footfalls in the grass. On our way back from school, we tried to find the broken shards of our passing. We never looked closely enough.
The spring would come, seeming colder than the winter, except for the plants shooting off tender green and the beginnings of flowers on the lengthening branches.
The trees grew skyward as if nothing could stop their ascension, the green returning and our walks twice daily was hardly enough to take it all in.
The street suffered from the subtle undulations and the residents complained of the tree roots traveling into their septic systems and plumbing. We would miss their shade and leaves larger than any hands we had ever seen, and the birds nesting, taking one twig at a time to build their homes. We would miss their shade when they were gone and how lonely the sidewalk would be, uprooted for nothing.
Labels: Prompted
posted by InkSpot | 2:31 AM
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