Small Yellow House

I look out the window at the tree in the back yard next door just behind a small yellow house. Its crown is still green, but I know leaves will fall. A dump truck with a flashing yellow strobe crawls along the side street as a city worker looks for cracks in the asphalt. And the neighbor’s pickup has been gone since last week. He said in passing one day he didn’t know if his lease would be renewed. I figure that’s the way it is— people move into the house and are gone before I have the chance to know them as they grow into their lives. And the city— it is living and dying even now, forty years after the tractor factory closed. Locals in the neighborhood bar downtown still gather watch football or baseball and commiserate— but even someone new is greeted as a friend. And I’m back in town to stay after four years of working with construction crews in five different states. Two darkened windows of the quiet house gaze across the front yard, ghosting the lives of those who have come and gone.