A Midsummer Tale ~ Third Place
Laura Sweeney

Photo Credit: Jamie Cantrell/Flickr (CC-by-nc)

It’s August. Or is it? In this COVID time, hard to tell. Feels more like September though I’m not from here, don’t know the weather and whether it should be more humid or less. Leaves fall, still green.

August. Five months into this pandemic. Where has the time gone? March—stockpiling like a mad woman, April—teaching Zoom class, May—thesis defense, June—post MFA collapse, July—devouring virtual conferences. This may be a forced sabbatical, but it’s not a vacation.

When my dog Freya and I first moved here, to the boot of Southern Illinois, we lived in a crappy apartment in a writer’s ghetto too close to campus and, before that, at University Village. I discovered Carbondale is a border town, an in-between place, not quite southern, not quite northern. A place in transition. Like me.

It was the Bryant family who I knew first, maybe the only family I knew in town. Cheryl, my landlady, has a good reputation and came highly recommended. She told me this neighborhood on the corner of Billy Bryan and Gher nestled between two dead-end streets, is mostly quiet, safe. I mispronounced it as grrrr, but she corrected me, said: say Gher as in Gary. This August, going on three years as her neighbor. Once she invited me to a pancake breakfast. Often, she’s invited me for cocktails, even offered furniture, which I declined. My bohemian ways must seem odd to her; she must sense there is a backstory.

Don’t know the backstory of this house, other than it was built circa 1945. I try to imagine who might have owned it then, some soldier returning from war? A Japanese mental health specialist lived here a few years back and then a couple with Dobermans who scared the neighbors across the street. But that couple moved out suddenly in the middle of the night.

And Labor Day weekend we moved in.

My landlady was right. Despite the angst of no job no prospects, there’s peace here. I often fall asleep watching a rom-com. Last night it was Nights in Rodanthe. Freya sleeps next to me, nestled in my bedding in the middle of the living room on the hardwood floor underneath the ceiling fan, and I don’t care that some would oppose such a companion.

From here you can hear the train, or is it Amtrak, rumbling downtown just like I had as a kid, awake August nights in that house with no air conditioning lying so still next to the screened window trying to catch a breeze. And here, just like home, crickets and locusts chorus all night.

Freya and I love this yard, its unfenced expanse, getting to know the neighbors who walk by with their binoculars because they say they have spotted a rare bird though I didn’t catch the name. And yesterday the badger next door poked his head out from his cubby hole underneath my landlady’s garage and watched as Freya and I did yard laps. How cute he and his badger wife are as they look both ways before they cross the street, then scamper between garages, fences, and sheds.

Bark is beautiful, one of the newscasters said. And the Bradford pear tree that fans my front lawn. The tent caterpillar nests intrigue. Even the rake resting against our maple tree and the mushrooms that sprout nearby, tiny penises that grow into Chinese hats or cocktail umbrellas. This region is rich in mushrooms and research for their medicinal properties. In Oakwood Park, just blocks from here, thrive the red kind with white dots that remind me of elves or gnomes. And earlier this month, mustard-yellow ones that grow in Frisbee-sized patches proliferated my yard till they turned brown and shriveled like funnel cake. Are they safe or poisonous? In the case of war or famine, Americans don’t know the resources we have around us. Fortunately, Freya leaves them alone.

There’s a giant cobweb strewn across my front porch, so I avoid that door. And there’s no telling what other spiders I may find. Once, while admiring one dangling from her thread, the breeze blowing her back and forth, another jumped down my shirt. Fireflies and butterflies and dragonflies flit about. And a batch of boxelder bugs camped at the edge of my garage until I doused them in apple cider vinegar. Mud wasps decorated my garage doorway, too, with organ pipe nests until I doused them with apple cider vinegar. But we’ve come to a compromise. They build their nests above the garage door. I hear them buzzing.

The garage intrigues: plenty of shelves and outlets, a couple of paint cans, a medicine cabinet, two torn mattresses above the rafters, a yellow ruler tucked in the ceiling. Also a security box that yielded no treasure. The garage door leads into the foyer and a white board with the question “How will I be resilient today?” scrawled across it.

Still, yesterday it all welled up inside me. The dominoes are falling, as my landlady says. I wanted to escape hours away but opted to drive to Murphysboro State Park just miles west of here. Passed the Smoky the Bear sign, chance of fire low. Sat at a picnic table at Waterlily Point and played fetch with Freya who found an orange tennis ball near a fire ring. Took solace in the white egret at the edge of the marsh. And the pine cones lining the parking lot.

At home, I often sit on a stack of cement blocks beside my garage while Freya sunbathes at the edge of the driveway or that nook under the mailbox. My landlady offered a chair but somehow this stoop feels better. Once I found a five-lined skink, its yellow stripes and electric blue tail pulsing. Maybe it means my luck is shifting.

Once the loony neighbor from 704, the one who claims he has seven PhDs and is a veteran of the Air Force and Navy and Marines, knocked on my back door asking me to take him to the gas station. When I turned him away, he offered a blessing. Now he walks by spewing obscenities about Hitler or holy water. I make every attempt to not make eye contact. Maybe that’s not nice or neighborly. Maybe I should ask about his time in the service or his POW flag. Certainly, I don’t want Freya wandering over into his yard.

As we do our yard laps, I pray for a vaccine, for the elections, for the essential workers on the frontlines. And to keep this a peaceful neighborhood. With the exception of the creepy dude, or the occasional domestic squabble, or the shirtless guy with his beer gut hanging out, I feel safe here. It was divine intervention the previous renters moved out in the middle of the night with no explanation. This one-story soldier cottage no basement with foyer and sun porch is perfect for a writer and her dog.

Oh, how I want to believe it’s safe here. But shopping, even though Walgreens is within walking distance, is limited. I shop off-hours, annoyed by customers ignoring the intercom reminders to wear a mask. Annoyed by the escalating incidence rate. All summer I deliberated whether to move back home. Explained to my landlady that my elderly parents live in the northwest corner of Iowa. There’s a meatpacking plant, an outbreak. But folks at the checkout counter with no social distancing or face masks are creepier.

I’m one of the immunocompromised, a lung obstruction. Limited options. No one stares or mocks or asks questions or finds it unusual at all as I insert my EBT card, then afterwards check the hand sanitizer to be sure it’s ethanol not methanol, squirt a bit and rub my palms together as I leave.

Back on my block, I check my mailbox. Two years and still don’t know when the mail arrives. I don’t wear gloves anymore the way I did back in March when I’d wipe down every grocery item. Even my landlady is casual as she stands too close without a mask and asks about fall plans. I’m looking online for freelance gigs, wonder how much to reveal to her. But heard a preacher say when you know the nature of a thing it’s easier to deal with, and the nature of a landlady is to squeeze as much rent as possible. Fortunately, she understands my predicament, was willing to reduce my rent. I looked up the property tax online. She’s still making money.

Yes, the weather seems odd these days, as the school year is upon us. This morning, signs of life at the baseball diamonds. Nice to hear the country music play as Freya and I walked the gravel path. Good to hear the whack of baseball bats and to see the camaraderie of the men hitting balls in practice.

Still, our first August here seems so long ago, as the days weeks months run together. On my good days Psalm 23 comes to mind: He makes me lie down in green pastures. This house, on this corner, in this in-between place where Freya and I walk laps. I’ve decided to leave the branches the storm leveled as yard art. But on my not-so-good days, I’m weary. Weary. And just shuffle along, wondering when this winter that never ends finally ends, what will we do? Will we look back on this time in American history as if August never happened?

Before this pandemic, all the pieces were coming together: the winding path of my education, the veered career trajectory. But now this woman on sabbatical, this woman with no makeup, this woman who hasn’t given herself a pedicure all summer though she gets a kick out of how often her dog Freya grooms her paws, longs for days to dress up. What is the look in my eyes the clerk sees peering out from my disheveled hair and multicolored kerchief?

I check my stoop for the five-lined skink, sit and open a package. The book is Life Interrupted, about Nineveh and Jonah’s shelter in the whale. The heat makes me stand and go back inside to pour myself a glass of low-sodium V8 juice and despite video fatigue watch a few more rom-coms until six p.m., then turn on ABC news. I scan the coronavirusillinois.gov site for the latest incident rate. An hour later, go back into the kitchen and make hot chocolate even though it’s August. Freya potties outside, one more yard lap, before her last treat of the day. Maybe a splash of milk. Maybe a half teenie Greenie. We settle on our bedding on the hardwood floor to watch a movie and fall asleep.

Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist’s Conference in Oslo, Norway. Her poems and prose appear in sixty plus journals and ten anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China. Her recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. In 2021, she received an Editor’s Prize in Flash Discourse from Open: Journal of Arts & Letters; Poetry Society of Michigan’s Barbara Sykes Memorial Humor Award; and two of her poems appear in the anthology Impact: Personal Portraits of Activism, which received an American Book Fest Best Book Award in Current Events category and finalist in the Social Change category. She is a PhD candidate, English/Creative Writing, at Illinois State University. Email: lauraswny[at]hotmail.com