“The Hedge” is also the opening chapter of my memoir,\u00a0Searching for Armando,\u00a0<\/em>La Sirena Press, 2016.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 My mother believed in such things.\u00a0 Fairies.\u00a0 Passion.\u00a0 Their fruited gifts.\u00a0 Their taxes.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 chute from the street and my mother\u2019s 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\u2019s perfect tools and, on Sundays, opera from the radio.<\/p>\n
In season, the hedge\u2019s 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.\u00a0 When the hedge was in bloom, I would enter the house only by the kitchen door, reaping the smell, intoxicated with mysterious yearning.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, on a sidewalk 50 years and 3000 miles away, I was startled by the sudden and insistent proximity of that familiar scent.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t locate the source, but I was transfixed, unwilling to move out of its range.\u00a0 The yearning that hadn\u2019t fit in the long-ago burgeoned into aching, proper life.\u00a0 Again I sit shucking corn on the wooden steps outside our kitchen.\u00a0 It\u2019s summer, of course\u2014in memory, childhood seems always to happen in summer or in the snow.\u00a0 Again I hear the soft babble of the fairy boy next door and the louder hum of bees among the hedge flowers.\u00a0 The old street is at my back, ahead a corner of clothesline in view, white diapers flapping.\u00a0 Strains of \u201cCarmen\u201d ride the humid air like spiderlings.\u00a0 The steps are warm and splintery beneath my bare feet.\u00a0 Corn silks litter my Bermuda shorts.<\/p>\n
I am happy but I want to cry.\u00a0 It is all too sweet, too gone, too deceptively simple, like the reach of the hedge\u2019s cloying scent beyond its rooted stems, beyond its sturdy, screening leaves.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“The Hedge” was published in the anthology,\u00a0Impact<\/em>, Telling Our Stories Press, 2012.<\/p>\n “The Hedge” is also the opening chapter of my memoir,\u00a0Searching for Armando,\u00a0<\/em>La Sirena Press, 2016.<\/p>\n
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