There is a brown tri-level one street over. The owners have painted a bold, angular mural on the garage door. We neighbors assume they are this generation’s hippies, without respect or even decency.

A month ago, the front yard, tended only by a picket fence badly needing fresh paint, was overgrown by three-foot high red clover. Strangely, there was a carefully worn foot path leading to a well watered china rose.

That day, I saw a woman, wearing only dingy, babydoll pajamas, gingerly tread that path, hose in hand, to sustain the bush. She did it with a solemnity that invited reverence.

Today, the clover and the rose are expiring in the heat of a now unforgiving summer. I am an unknown man and cannot stop to enquire. Where is the rose’s woman?

angry? hurt?

staring at the murky mirror

i wait for focus