These many months of home confinement remind me of growing up in Fifties, in a small town with small houses, each occupied by a housewife who almost never ventured out. Before my mother would step outside to hang the laundry on the line, she’d first check to make sure Old Lady Warren wasn’t stirring—Old Lady Warren being our next door neighbor, a woman exactly the same age as my other, but with bleached blonde hair instead of gray and no children. Back before they stopped speaking, Mrs. Warren had confessed that was, sadly, unable to conceive. Which made her an anomaly—the only housewife in town without a herd of children running about.
No one could remember why my mother and Mrs. Warren had stopped speaking, or why, exactly, we were forbidden to set foot on her property. What I did know was that we had to be very careful when playing catch in the yard, because should a baseball go over the fence and land in Mrs. Warren’s yard, that would be the last we’d see of it. Once, I swear, she was out the front door and off the porch so quickly that she fielded it on the first hop. And that was the end of our game of catch, until such time as we could procure another baseball.
Here is a picture I snapped of my brother Jim about to unleash a fastball. Note that there is only one car in the road and few houses in the background. We lived two blocks from the edge of town, beyond which lay thousands upon thousands of square miles of undeveloped public land. Head north and you’d find yourself in the Book Cliffs; go east and you’d find yourself atop the forested Wasatch Plateau. Head south and you’d soon find yourself in Canyonlands! But did we ever go to such places? Hardly ever, because families in those days pretty much stayed home, tending and defending their respective plots.
Here’s another picture: my other brother Chuck stretching to snag Jim’s errant pitch before it goes over the fence that separated our property from Old Lady Warren’s warren. It was just a waist-high white picket fence, but it might as well have been the Berlin Wall, or the Iron Curtain. I don’t remember who put it there, or which family was responsible for its upkeep. I only remember that it never replaced, never repaired, nor was it ever repainted. None of us dared even touch it.
Our respective backyards were separated by a six-foot high hedge, so there was always the chance your ball might become lodged in the shrubbery, and you’d be able to retrieve it before Mrs. Warren could get her hands on it. However, one time a football made it all the way through, and in my mind’s eye I can still see the shadowy image of my brother Chuck moving furtively on the far side of the DMZ—like that famous 16mm film clip of a retreating Bigfoot.
Chuck was much braver than I. Never once did ever set foot in Mrs. Warren’s front yard, let alone the back. That is, not until decades later, after both my widowed mother and her widowed nemesis had both been relocated to nursing homes. I was cleaning up around our now vacant house when I noticed that a limb from Mrs. Warren’s dying Siberian elm had fallen across a power line, and the only way to remove it entailed setting foot on terra incognita. Let me tell you, my heart was pounding! I once walked through the notorious San Juan barrio known as La Perla, but compared to the time I set foot in Old Lady Warren’s backyard, La Perla was a walk in the park.