XThe cul-de-sac on Birchwood Lane was not on our original list.<\/p>\n
We had a list, Ben and I, the way young couples buying their first house have lists, the organized anxiety of people who have saved for a long time and are about to spend it on something permanent and want to be certain.<\/p>\n
The list had requirements about square footage and school districts and commute times and proximity to the grocery store I liked, and it did not include cul- de-sac specifically because we had not thought to include it, because we had not yet understood what a cul-de-sac actually meant.<\/p>\n
Our realtor showed us the house on a Tuesday afternoon in October six years ago, and we pulled onto Birchwood Lane for the first time with the professional skepticism of people who had already looked at eleven houses and had learned to distrust first impressions, and the street had its effect on me before I had the language for it.<\/p>\n
The cul-de-sac circle at the bottom was where it happened.<\/p>\n
There were three children in the circle when we arrived. A girl who looked about five drawing<\/p>\n
something enormous with sidewalk chalk, the drawing covering a significant portion of the pavement. A boy who looked about eight riding his bicycle in slow careful loops, narrating the loops to himself in the specific murmur of a child deep in a story. A smaller child, too young to be doing anything complicated, simply walking back and forth across the chalk drawing with the authority of someone for whom walking across things is sufficient activity.<\/p>\n
I watched them through the car window.<\/p>\n
Ben said: what do you think?<\/p>\n
I said: I think we\u2019re buying this house.<\/p>\n
He looked at the house, which we had not yet examined.<\/p>\n
I said: the house doesn\u2019t matter. Look at the street.<\/p>\n
He looked at the street.<\/p>\n
He said: oh.<\/p>\n
The house was good. Three bedrooms, older construction but solid, a kitchen that needed work but had bones worth working with, a small backyard that would become, over the following six years, the site of a garden I did not know yet I was going to plant. The basement finished. The heating system updated two years prior. The school district, when I checked, was excellent.<\/p>\n
We put in an offer that week and closed in December, and we moved in during the first week of January when the circle at the bottom of the cul-de-sac was salt-white from the winter maintenance and the sidewalk chalk was dormant until spring.<\/p>\n
I met Walter at fourteen the first week.<\/p>\n
He was sixty-two then and he had been in that house for, he told me, twenty-three years, and he had watched the street evolve through many iterations of families and children and the particular ongoing drama of a small fixed community. He was a retired high school shop teacher with the specific quality of retired shop teachers, the ease of a man who has spent thirty years surrounded by young people attempting things and has learned to be comfortable with the sound of effort.<\/p>\n
His wife had died four years before we moved in. He had two adult children who visited<\/p>\n
occasionally and called regularly and who had, in the absence of daily family structure, been supplemented by the children of the cul-de-sac in the way that things are supplemented when a need exists and a supply presents itself.<\/p>\n
The chalk bucket appeared on his porch the first spring we were there.<\/p>\n
A galvanized metal bucket, the gardening kind, stuffed with sidewalk chalk in every color, sitting at the bottom of his porch steps where it was visible from the circle and accessible without knocking. He put it out in April and brought it in October and every year the chalk supply replenished itself in the way of things that are maintained by someone who considers the maintaining worth doing.<\/p>\n
My children learned about the chalk bucket before they could read.<\/p>\n
Isla was three and Oliver was six that first spring, and they were already part of the circle in the way that children on a cul-de-sac become part of it, through proximity and the natural gravitational pull of other children, and the chalk bucket was the center of the circle\u2019s artistic life in the way that certain objects become central to a community not because anyone planned them to but because they arrive at the right moment and fill a space that turns out to have been waiting.<\/p>\n
Oliver drew maps.<\/p>\n
He drew elaborate maps of imaginary territories that expanded over the days of a good week, each day adding new regions and landmarks, and the other children would add to them or dispute the borders with the seriousness of cartographers, and by the end of a week the entire circle was covered in a collaborative geography that the next rain would erase.<\/p>\n
Isla drew animals, then people, then increasingly abstract things that she described in exact terms, and the descriptions were more interesting than the drawings, which were also interesting.<\/p>\n
I am telling you about the chalk and the maps and Isla\u2019s descriptions because they are the substance of what this street was, the specific texture of something that had grown over years from the quiet persistence of a man who kept a bucket on his porch, and because the substance of a thing is what you understand only when it is threatened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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