sonora2sonoma

By Tim Konrad

Our neighborhood was a mostly friendly place for a child to grow up. We knew most of our neighbors, many of whom remained in the neighborhood for years.

The neighbors uphill from us, Josie and John, were like family. John was enjoying his retirement after laboring for many years doing railway maintenance for the West Side Logging Railroad out of Tuolumne.

John was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and said he’d come to America because there’d been no opportunities in Scotland for a young man to get ahead.  His fair complexion had  not fared well against the relentless California sunshine whose effects necessitated repeated trips to the doctor for the surgical removal of skin lesions that are routinely frozen off by dermatologists these days.

Josie had emigrated from Italy, or what she called “the old country,” when she was a young woman. A pious person with a lifelong devotion to helping others, Josie seldom ever spoke ill of anyone.

Once, while telling me how her eldest son had died fighting in the Second World War, Josie had shocked me when she’d sworn in my presence, referring to Benito Mussolini, Italy’s then head of state, as a “son of a bitch.” She’d been showing me an old newspaper clipping at the time that pictured Mussolini and his “prostitute” girlfriend, as Josie called her, hanging upside down, their remains on public display following their murder at the hands of an angry mob while trying to escape the advancing Allied Forces during Italy’s defeat.

Swearing was very out of character for someone like Josie, but it seemed entirely appropriate given what the war had cost her.

For many years, my parents would get together with Josie and John on Christmas mornings to share shots of whiskey.

Bertha and Carlton, the neighbors across the street from us, were also friendly people who contributed to the overall harmony of the neighborhood. Both Bertha and Josie exchanged greeting cards with our family on special occasions.

My mother didn’t socialize much with Pat, the neighbor downhill from us. Her husband, “Tar,” was a warm and friendly man who grew an impressive vegetable garden in his backyard every year, but he left it to his wife to arrange their social calendar.

Pat had never forgiven me for having kicked her in the shin with my cowboy boot when I was around four years old. Even though I have no recollection of the act, that didn’t stop Pat from reminding me of it periodically for decades afterward. Every time she did so, her reminders always bore the sting of indictment.

Following that event, battle lines were drawn, at least as far as Pat was concerned, that would remain in place for the duration of our acquaintance. The atmosphere during that time along the area bordering our yards was best characterized as tentative, semi-frigid and unwelcoming.

Pat was one of those people who despised clutter, a proclivity that manifested in her yard as well as her house. Tar had planted two fruit trees in their front yard to shade their house from the afternoon sun. Just about the time the trees had grown tall enough to begin providing shade, Tar died suddenly of a heart attack while fishing in the mountains with his brother-in-law.

Tar was only in his fifties, and Pat was angry at her husband for having died and left her alone—something she never forgave him for. One of her first acts after his passing was to have the two trees he’d planted cut down to prevent having to deal with the inevitable leaf-litter she knew would descend on her domain and disturb her sense of order.

What Pat couldn’t do, however, was control the course of the leaves that, floating on the breezes like fractal confetti, insinuated their way from our yard, or from the walnut tree that then grew beside Bertha’s house across the street, to hers.

While some may find the feuille morte of autumn leaves comforting, nostalgic even, Pat was not one of those persons. This uninvited vegetable matter was a source of annoyance for Pat and became the target of her rapid-response-team approach to leaf eradication, prompting my father to share the mental picture he had conjured of her, rake in hand, standing at the ready lest some errant and offending leaf should dare to transgress her sovereign territory.

For years after my father’s passing, Pat periodically grumbled at me over the leaves from the trees in our yard that would, in spite of her best efforts, succeed in obeying the laws of gravity, bedeviling her efforts to control her environment as they deepened the frown lines in her face.

But sympathy failed to bridge the chasm of miscommunication that existed between us, and Pat’s solution to the leaf business—removing the offending  trees—was, for this tree-loving person, too drastic a move to contemplate, much less employ.  

To be continued: