The Yard Interval
Playhouse
Big men came with
hammers and trucks
and pulled the garage
down. I watched from
the upstairs window
as they tugged at the slanting
foundation-- the rotted
white boards and roof shingles
fell. I was too young to be sad,
to miss the old structure-- just a slab of
concrete now where we could
roller skate until they build the
new one. Then they tore down
the picket fence that ran behind
the old garage. I watched
them work, the first jackhammer
I’d seen, in the late afternoon sun
blazing orange behind their shoulders.
When they pour the new foundation,
we get to put our hand prints in
the wet concrete with the date
and Daddy took parts of the old
wooden fence and built a play
house for us. We will make mud
pies for dinner and dry them on
the playhouse roof until they’re hard.
Bricks for building memories.
Leafhouse
In autumn the leaves fall
yellow and orange and brown
and gather on the small front lawn.
Daddy wants to rake them to the
curb before it rains and they get
all soggy and kill big spots
of grass, or the snow starts
and they’re frozen over. But
first they are ours.
We sweep the leaves into the thin
straight outlines of a blueprint:
solid lines for walls, gaps where
there are doors, circles for chairs,
rectangles for beds and couches,
and at the very edge of the yard
where the sidewalk looms to the
street, a half-moon balcony.
A leaf house of our own design
it will last until the wind picks
up at night. And next year we
will reconstruct it. Exactly the
same way.
Porch-house
The patio furniture resides
in the screened-in back porch
its legs are thin, but heavy and
the protective ends have fallen
off so when we move the chairs
around they scratch the floor, a
map of where they’ve been.
The cement walkway makes a
perfect driveway for our bikes and
we parallel park there between
important errands-- (the neighbor’s
yard is the grocery store, the garage
serves as both bank and brake-shop)
Mama put our play kitchen out for
us and every day we live several
days there, sleeping and waking
driving and parking, shopping and
cooking, breaking and fixing,
a microcosm. We decide when
the sun goes down.
