on
4/20/2002
There's an odd quality to a city with a profusion of trees planted in it, in that, when seen from a properly low angle to the horizon, large tracts of the city will appear to be forest with only a few buildings poking up out of it. It's a comforting feeling to me, being a native of Maine, to be able to look out over Mission Hill or past South Boston, or out toward Newton, and see, although my conscious mind knows that there are miles of sprawl in that direction, mainly trees, as if the city were ending just twenty minutes' walk from me.
So it was little surprise to me today when, setting out on a course previously untravelled toward some wooded area, I found myself in the narrow streets of a part of Greater Boston I had not known existed. The streets were narrow and winding, and edged with copper-roofed brick houses of a single period's design (though I couldn't say what period of architecture they represented). I wondered if the place was on the periphery of a university, such was the feeling the self-contemporary houses gave me; indeed, I was reminded of Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and for a moment disoriented myself on not knowing for sure that I wasn't back there. Seeing no public marks as I walked onward, I christened the neighborhood Brassdays, in my head.
Suddenly, I stopped, and I don't know just why. I stopped, and though my legs, and the people I vaguely sensed in the doorways and around the corner, as well as seemingly some natural rhythm of the city, wanted me to go on, I stayed where my feet had landed. The very air seemed to make me want to go onward, find a landmark and perhaps making my way back toward home, but I stayed there, stubbornly. The wind died, gradually, and the sounds of people and cars, for seemingly one random instant, died down. I was alone in this strange place, and time had gone about it's business elsewhere, without me.
The trees were moving, but I couldn't hear them. The windows were black as slate. I saw beside me a foot high slab of greening wood at the border of a fallow garden, and, puffing my hubris still further, sat, and looked around me. It wasn't long before my eyes alighted on the only other moving thing on that street. A girl, her complexion painted green and copper in the setting sun, staring out at me from bunchy streams of her short black hair, stood in a dooryard opposite me. I raised a hand, saying not a word. She gave me an odd look, if her face changed at all. Finally, she motioned me to come toward her as she turned away. I cocked my head to one side, collected myself, and strode across the street to her.
"Have a glass of water," she said, quietly as rustling leaves. I followed her into the dimness of the first floor doorway, and walked through ten feet of somber hallway, before she passed through the closed door at the end, and disappeared.
I knew her for a little ghostThat in my garden walked;
The wall is high -- higher than most --
And the green gate was locked....
And where the wall is built in new,And is of ivy bare,
She paused -- then opened and passed through
A gate that once was there.
Touch the Toast