Manual High School
In this neighborhood of hundred-year-old houses, hundred-year-old silver maples, I walk the incline from my block to where the hillcrest and the playing fields of Manuel High School open a view of the Front Range. Snow evaporated from the high country a bit more each day until now only the peaks retain slivers of white on their bare flanks. For the last weeks of ozone, heat and fire smoke, that view has varied from hazy to invisible. The baseball field’s green is foamy with clover in bloom. A volunteer trumpet vine works its way up the high sports field fence, its flowers flaming, unscathed by lack of care. The view to the north was always treetops, a few peaked roofs spearing through foliage. The sudden “in-ness” of the formerly desolate industrial section beyond us has resulted, when trees are bare, in the tops of ten-story buildings barging into view. Today three cranes hover ravenously above all else. It was once possible to imagine my neighborhood as the city’s end, urban development north of us unseen. Soon we’ll be hemmed in, our inner-city designation as true as it shamefully was when our borders were redlined.
Trumpet vine on soccer field fence
Your writing prompt: “Change is not good,” said one of my students, walking into my classroom after I’d rearranged the seats. The piece above is—except for the last line—a lament about change. Yet nothing is more constant in our lives and we often crave it. What do you say about change? Post in comments on the blog, please.
Change. Whether I want it or try to avoid it, welcome it or fear it, it happens, sometimes so slowly it takes years to notice, sometimes so fast it leaves me spinning. Even pocket change changes. I finally spent the last of mine at the post office last week.
Change is all that is. The face of God.