Ode to Spring Street

Google Map screenshots

Google Maps photographed my old neighborhood during the summer of the last year that I lived there and I just recently realized it. Over the past few days I found myself "walking" through the oh so familiar streets, drowning in nostalgia from 250 miles and many years away. 

There in the photo on the left is my morning glory installation, erected with friends and neighbors and toppled yearly from the weight of itself. There is the yellow metal cabinet that I spray painted on the lawn after hauling it up the hill myself. There's my garden, full of nasturtiums and kale and tomatoes and irises. And the sunken part of the yard where the junebugs hatched, predictably, every June. Those were my living room windows, the three on the left there, apartment 3 of 5 (!) in that small bungalow. In three years that little house saw so much of my life. Friends moved in and out. I had a cat, this was the only house he lived in, from kittenhood until he disappeared two years later. I lived there alone for the first time in my whole life. I went back to school. 

That last year was the best year. When I lived alone, me and my broken heart, and Wendel the cat before he became a coyote snack. My lover lived a few blocks over, there's her house in the middle with her orange scooter and her lawn flamingos. That porch is where we fell in love while she worked on mix tapes and made me laugh until I cried. Up the hill a little and over one block was our lover-turned-friend-turned-lover-turned-friend, and if we weren't on either of our porches, we were there on that porch with the little potted plants, and an ice cream truck next door. 

You can't see the sunken toilets, or the mold, the creepy neighbor or the self righteous one, who sprayed my medicinal herb patch for poison ivy and didn't tell me until I'd been drinking toxic tea for weeks. You can't see the heartbreak, the fights, the leaving, the parties, the shows in the front yard. In the Google Maps rendition of the neighborhood, it is a gorgeous day always, devoid of people but full of familiarity. I like it that way- there is enough sadness in the world already, what's the harm in pretending that the sun always shines on Spring Street.