Piney Branch is not an easy street to cross. I avoid it subconsciously, like not calling someone back. I keep west, in the diminishing 'V' of car-less blocks formed as Piney Branch runs southwest to meet mighty Georgia Avenue—a blue collar road in a white collar city, check cashing places and windowless clubs with dancers.
I wade forward in anonymity, dropping my pace and inhaling magnolia and English boxwood, atomized into the air by the afternoon sun. Children are in school. Everybody's at work.
Each 4,000-square-foot lot tells a different story. Some are ringed by a simple iron fence, but others are cribs of chain link, the climbing roses poking through the rhombus gaps like yellow breakfast buns.
At a large corner house, the weeds grow tall and the paint sags away from the concrete. The blinds in the windows belong to another time—eyelids shut with the dignity of well-earned rest.
Across the street a canary-colored compound of bay windows and walled, unseen gardens is polite but reserved. A dinner plate of mulch mounds up below each crape myrtle, and the grass behaves.
On a different block, a raised bed alongside steps puts armfuls of marigolds, cat mint, geraniums, lavender, asters, and Sedum at chest height, perfect for smelling. Along the curb, low branches of young trees brush you like dancers' arms. Up ahead, a single cat crosses.
Azalea time has come and gone, exhausting and overstimulating as a college romance, and the bushes have resumed their green composure. June is here.
My breaths are finally coming from deeper down, and my fingertips are purple and cool. I pick the mail up and unlock the door.
It was such a short walk.
