Appendix Street

No street lights illuminate my little street. The seventeen houses were built among orange groves before streetlights were commonplace. The oldest homes on this dead-end little lane date from the 1920’s. At night it is pitch black, a charm contrasting the white-light of the surrounding streets.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Like an appendix whose bodily service seems useless, this seeming inconsequential one-block long neighborhood means little to the town’s population. But here, intimacy is rewarded. Its members know of the life, and the death, of their neighbors.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

In the past few years, this small road has lost seven of its friends and neighbors. This seems a high death ratio, but perhaps because of its tiny population, the residents actually know all their neighbors. On Appendix Street, there is no second block.⠀

The residents all know each of these seven departed ones: the car mechanic with the failing heart, his school counselor wife with lifelong lung disease brought on by smoking parents, their policeman son with years-long debilitating pain due to an on-duty injury, Disneyland’s lighting and illumination engineer, the middle-aged son succumbing after surgery, the college professor whose heart gave out at his dinner table, the life-long teacher whose final stroke felled her. The homes of these last two neighbors faced directly across the street from each other; their obituaries appeared in last week’s local newspaper, directly across the page from each other.⠀⠀⠀⠀

The mulberry tree holding the neighborhood rope swing once stood in our front yard. The tree has died, and now nothing will grow in the soil in its place. A friend, a landscaper, informed me that a new tree cannot be planted exactly where a former tree has died. The decaying roots of the old tree still produce enough heat that a new tree cannot live in that same place.⠀⠀⠀⠀

We are all some kind of standard-bearer. The deposit of our lives, the standards that we carry, possess a permanence that a succeeding life does not replace. Each life deposits the labor of a life sowed, and for that, the other lives on our little street will not be the same.