On keeping your eyes open

A couple of years after I moved to the District, I was walking up Massachusetts Avenue between Union Station and Stanton Park. I stood at Fourth Street for a moment, waiting to cross, but then I walked on. The day had just reached dusk and all the day's colors were deeper by a shade or two. I looked around and in the front yard of the row house directly behind Schneider's Liquor--where Members of Congress who live on the Hill tend to get their booze--sat a woman in a chair.

She had a look about her that said she wasn't from around here: large, soft, of an undetermined age. Her cheeks were full and pink, but she did not smile and she had made her eyes into slits. She wore a faded medium blue housedress with pink flowers and bedroom slippers; her straight brown hair was pulled back. She sat in a metal folding chair. Above all she was still. Summer was near its end, and the grass was dark green as it came up around the chair's legs and her feet.

In the woman's lap, cradled in one arm, sat a white rabbit with its ears tucked back. She stroked the fur on its back quite deliberately. I wondered briefly if she saw me watching her, and then I went on my way home wondering all the while if I had really seen the woman with the rabbit in that yard.

I hadn't thought of that moment in years. How long will it be, I wonder, until I remember the woman holding the giant pale cat? What will send me back to today?

~~~~~

Now that Nicole has moved her journal to a home of its own, I'm feeling a tad envious. I have a perfectly good domain name and free web space with DNS for it, if I just get my act together and prove to Network Solutions that I exist and am who I say I am, maybe I'll follow suit and make a move.

before - after