Story of the Month: The Hedge

We called it, simply, the hedge. Neglected, tough, ever green, it stood thick and glossy-leaved along the side of the house next to the neighbors who, in fair weather, kept their cheerful, golden toddler all day in a playpen in the driveway, a child whose beauty so far excelled the mien of his homely siblings and downtrodden parents that my mother insisted he must have been brought by fairies or, at least, been the outcome of one unexpected night of transcendent passion.  My mother believed in such things.  Fairies.  Passion.  Their fruited gifts.  Their taxes.

The hedge and the side wall of our house formed a narrow corridor from the mailbox to the kitchen steps and door, and on past the door to the clothesline under the trees—a  chute from the street and my mother’s small rock garden out front to the back yard, from which you could descend into the cool, shadowy cellar, a realm of sawdust and my father’s perfect tools and, on Sundays, opera from the radio.

In season, the hedge’s generous sprays of white blossoms emitted a delicate perfume detectable yards away, an unreasonable scent that evoked a strange blend of melancholy and elation close to homesickness, though I had not yet begun to imagine any other place or time.  When the hedge was in bloom, I would enter the house only by the kitchen door, reaping the smell, intoxicated with mysterious yearning.

Yesterday, on a sidewalk 50 years and 3000 miles away, I was startled by the sudden and insistent proximity of that familiar scent.  I couldn’t locate the source, but I was transfixed, unwilling to move out of its range.  The yearning that hadn’t fit in the long-ago burgeoned into aching, proper life.  Again I sit shucking corn on the wooden steps outside our kitchen.  It’s summer, of course—in memory, childhood seems always to happen in summer or in the snow.  Again I hear the soft babble of the fairy boy next door and the louder hum of bees among the hedge flowers.  The old street is at my back, ahead a corner of clothesline in view, white diapers flapping.  Strains of “Carmen” ride the humid air like spiderlings.  The steps are warm and splintery beneath my bare feet.  Corn silks litter my Bermuda shorts.

I am happy but I want to cry.  It is all too sweet, too gone, too deceptively simple, like the reach of the hedge’s cloying scent beyond its rooted stems, beyond its sturdy, screening leaves.

“The Hedge” was published in the anthology, Impact, Telling Our Stories Press, 2012.

“The Hedge” is also the opening chapter of my memoir, Searching for Armando, La Sirena Press, 2016.