I am on my way down the path to my car. A woman comes toward me. “I am your neighbor,” she says. “Oh,” I say, “I wonder why we haven't met before.”
She tells me she lives in the trailer park behind our property. My home is separated from hers by a field and a fence that is covered by blackberry bushes. Robert Frost said: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Fences also shield us from one another. They keep us apart.
The woman's name is Marilyn. She is on a mission. She has been adopted by a Persian cat and she wants to find the owner. She tells me she learned to move a photo of the cat from IPhoto to document to email. She is a woman of late middle age (or early old age, depending upon how you look at it). She is my age, an aging woman. She is alive, vibrant, and engaged with the world.
Marilyn loves animals. She is also a master gardener. We talk about plants. She wants to divide her phlox and her penstemen and she wants to give me some of them.
Her neighbor is an elderly man who is often depressed. She tells me he would love to have some of my canna lilies, should I be willing to divide them.
I say, “Of course, I will give him some.” I will divide the cannas, walk up my street to the highway, go a block or so south, go east through a construction zone to the trailer park road. I will continue on the road until I find her place.
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