Waiting Patiently

I’m waiting for the guys from the City to come back and pour concrete in the sidewalk mold they constructed last week. I’ve always known the sidewalk doesn’t belong to me, but it’s technically in my yard, and they didn’t even bother to tell me they’d be tearing it up to fix something below it. I guess maybe when the good city of Aurora decides to fix a problem, they figure their benevolence is in the fact that they don’t make the homeowner pay for it, maybe?

Anyway, one of the workers knocked on my door last week, not to inform me that the city would be annihilating a section of sidewalk but to ask me to move my car so they could get the backhoe in the right spot. I looked over his shoulder and saw my mailbox with its wooden post ripped from its foundation and laying on the curb.

Sure, I can move my car. Thanks for moving my mailbox.

They made a mess of my yard from the place where the sidewalk goes to the curb at the street. I guess they fixed what was broken. It started raining, and I was wondering if I should call the City and inquire as to their plans for restoration. I mean, Halloween was coming and two caution signs on either side of a six-foot chasm was really going to ruin my cemetery decorations and take away from my massive three-headed blow up dragon.

The commotion in my front yard provided barking material for my dogs for three days. I knew when the men where out there by the way my dogs alerted me that most assuredly we were under attack. While it rained, it seemed the men were gone and the dogs went back to being bored and otherwise quiet. So I was surprised to walk by the front door one morning last week to see a lone guy in jeans and a safety vest awkwardly hammering together what I assume is a concrete mold for a new sidewalk.

It was drizzling and cold, the kind of weather that feeds my depression and robs the world of color. Clearly, this guy shared my disdain for the flavor of the day. I watched for a while as he held a mallet in one hand and wrestled with a length of wood in the other, pounding and pushing and willing the wood to become a border for my missing sidewalk. He looked like a frustrated husband trying to complete a project for a pushy wife, a wife who insisted despite the weather that this project must be completed on THIS DAY, or else. I thought about offering him some hot chocolate, or just a kind word… but I wasn’t in the mood to be all that hospitable myself, especially if it included having to put on socks and shoes and a jacket of some sort. And to be honest, watching him in more misery than I was in seemed somehow soothing and at the same time altogether wrong.

I don’t know much about construction, but I didn’t think it was a good day to pour concrete so I wondered how far he’d get as I walked away from the window.

A couple days later the sun was shining, and the mud was drying, and “they” have yet to come pour the concrete in the wooden mold that worker created. I’ve walked past it to my re-uprighted mailbox several times; a clever trick-or-treater commented on how much he liked the construction as part of my Halloween decorations; I’m kind of getting used to the ugliness that is this little section of my world.

Yet, I keep waiting patiently to see the mold full of fresh grey smooth concrete, dark in comparison to the rest of the neighborhood sidewalks as it sets. I want to put my hand in it, write my name and maybe the year.

I consider it fortunate, to bear a week or two of lawn permanence torn asunder for the opportunity to make my mark in the world on the land I own. I think about that sidewalk, and I’m waiting for my moment- I think about how I might put our last name and something cryptic, something that, for years, as moms walking babies in strollers and joggers and kids coming home from school who go past that section of sidewalk might look down at my mark and up at my house and think, “I wonder…”

We get so few opportunities to carve our names in stone, and generally we aren’t around when someone decides what font and which appropriate sentiment should serve as the evidence that we were here. Unless you, for some reason, have a building named in your honor… but I don’t think I’m in danger of earning anything that extravagant. So I’ll take this little chunk of sidewalk and make it mine.

I haven’t even done it yet and it feels a little clandestine, a little unlawful. Permanent vandalization… I can’t wait.

If you ever get the opportunity to leave your mark in wet concrete outside of the only house you’ve ever felt at home in, I hope you take it.