There was a new POD in the parking lot. Someone was moving. It could be the older man who sits on his porch. Why wouldn’t it be? But maybe it was his neighbor. Nothing looked empty where the man usually sat in the early evenings.
The man who sits on his porch usually has a friend over. Rarely he sits by himself. “You look beautiful in your dress,” he said to me once when I was walking the dog past his place. I usually walk past his place twice a day on dog walks.
He used to sit on his porch every single night. Music would blast from inside the apartment out the screen doors. It was usually music I liked– Bowie, Dire Straits, The Beatles. The music was so loud I thought it bold of him. But he wasn’t alone or with a friend back then. He was with his wife. She wore headbands around her bald head and always had some sort of paper in her hand, like a crossword puzzle.
They would always wave at me as I passed them on my dog walks. We’d never spoken a word to each other, although once his wife yelled out that she liked my pink hair. Every night the same. Hear the music pulsing from a building away, walk past (sometimes mouthing the lyrics), wave and smile, hurry by so I didn’t have to speak.
After a while I took another route because this was getting too predictable and sometimes I didn’t feel like smiling or waving.
Weeks and weeks later when I went back to that route, neither one of them were there. The porch was empty of them. Only all their whimsical clutter– the hanging bird wind chimes, red and green wicker furniture, yellow and red rectangle pots of half-dead flowers. Maybe they were on vacation.
But this vacation latest weeks. Then they were back. But the wife was not on the porch anymore. Every night just him with no music.
I asked a neighbor if she had died. They said she was there in the apartment with hospice care.
Tonight I walked past on a breezy June evening that gave respite to the scorching heat of the day. The plants were still there, but the wicker furniture was gone.
I guess my initial thought about the POD was right. He is moving. And why not?
Busted Flip Flops 