Week 4Summer Week 4
The crow stared at me and I stared back at him, and looking into his eyes was like looking in a dark mirror.
—Kate DiCamillo, Louisiana’s Way Home
Haywood and I have lived in this house for almost thirty years. Here we raised three children, buried five dogs, let an uncountable number of fallen leaves lie in a life shot through with leavings. All but a handful of our first neighbors are gone now. They have died in their own beds or gone off to die in beds that smell vaguely of bleach. No one will ever live in their houses again. One morning, after one of them leaves—for the retirement home, for the funeral home—I wake to the sound of a backhoe chewing down what’s left of their lives here: the small rooms where their babies slept; the doorways where they stood when trick-or-treaters came at Halloween and carolers came at Christmastime; the windows where they waited, worried for a teenager who had not come home.
It is one thing to watch as plain, working-class homes are destroyed to make room for fine, fancy houses. It is another thing altogether for the unwavering shade trees and the raucous jumble of wildflowers to be mowed down, too, with no more thought than a lawnmower gives the grass. So much life cut off for no reason but commerce.
Even before a backhoe takes its first bite out of the perfectly sturdy roof that kept my old friends dry in storms, before the utility trenches kill any trees that survived the backhoe, the pickers arrive. They come for what is always called an estate sale, though the house is hardly more than a life-sized shoebox. I stop in sometimes, hoping to find a lasting memento of people whose lives overlapped with mine only circumstantially but for a long time. People who raise children together and look for lost dogs together and take time to visit in the street after supper can become friends, and their friendship is woven from many strands. Longtime neighbors can have more in common than colleagues, more than many siblings.
The last time I went to an estate sale, I bought an apron my friend wore when she baked, as well as a book signed by another neighbor whose death I still mourn. I tried on the apron and thought of the time my friend first mentioned her book club, the one she had joined as a lonely young mother. When I asked her which book they were currently reading, she laughed: “Oh, honey, we haven’t read a book in fifty years.”
On estate-sale days, cars line both sides of our narrow street. These are always expensive vehicles, polished trucks kept safely in a garage at night, late-model SUVs with cargo space to spare. They rarely belong to the people you’d think to find at yard sales, people with not enough money to buy something new. Mostly these are the well-off bargain hunters, the resellers with the cleverly arranged booths in antique malls on the edge of suburbia. They have come to pick the bones of the dead. I am hardly better, I know, me with my book and my apron, now 40 percent off.
Often the crows are quarreling in the treetops while the pickers load their cars. It’s easy to think of them, too, as big jostling birds, ungainly carrion-eaters. But human beings are neither vultures nor crows. The world would count itself lucky if we were vultures or crows. An actual vulture turns death into feathers. An actual crow turns flesh into flight.