Swept Away 

    The other day I visited my old neighborhood and discovered that I couldn't. Since I had moved away twelve years ago, two friends had died, a third wasn't home when I drove by , and a fourth, whose car was in the driveway, is much too nervous for me to drop in on unannounced. When you move out of a neighborhood, your drop-in privileges dry up unless you keep using them I drove on.

    This is a neighborhood whose streets I know as well as the faces of my own children . I see them, trooping in their clown and princess costumes up to front doors on Halloween. I see myself, terrified, walking through the park, a trench coat over my nightgown, calling their names when they haven't come home before dark. But they aren't here and neither am I , except as a visitor who has been left holding a bag, which is full of ghosts and connections and love - for what and whom I am not sure. . . 

    I decide to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks. where the dry cleaners used to be. At 8:30 in the morning, it is full of handsome, well-dressed men with shining hair and toned bodies. They order their skim decafe Grandes, and stare quietly out the window, planning their day, exuding intelligence and worldliness. I want to get to know them, hear about their powerful jobs and exciting , high-octane lives . But this is unrealistic and throws me back upon the truth that the only person I have the absolute right and obligation to get to know is myself.

    I leave Starbucks and think of one more place in the neighborhood I want to visit - the cooperative garden. During the difficult Middle Kingdom years of marriage and child-rearing, I would often leave my house for a few hours of weeding and watching the butterflies flit over the zinnia and tomato plants. It calmed me down to stare at a drop of rain water on a cabbage leaf, or discuss the merits of marigolds as a bug deterrent. Surely, the garden - if not the gardeners - would be the same. 

    Wrong. What had once been a wide-open, riotous profusion of vegetables and flowers was now a tidy citadel of separate, padlocked enclosures, staked out with 2 x 4s wrapped in plastic netting . "It's the deer" explained one of the new gardeners, a bright-eyed 50'ish looking woman who said that she had not been a member of the cooperative for very long. 

    Her story was interesting. A nurse who had been married to two different Frenchmen in France for twenty years, she had come home, she said, "to get some benefits. My life," she conceded "is nowhere near as dramatic now but it's simple - except when I complicate it." 

    Poking around a plastic bag she pulled out a packet of cotton seeds and flashed a grin. "I'm going to grow my own underwear.." For the first time since I had been in my old neighborhood I laughed and wondered whether I could rent a plot and commute. 

    I found a bench outside the garden enclosure and sat down. Recently given as a memorial to a child who had died, it was a sturdy and comfortable bench , just right for thinking about the perishability of life - and all the gardeners who used to come here.

    The garden cooperative's self-selected overseer was a tall, string-saving Norwegian named Mr. Olson, whose wife got jealous whenever he talked to the younger women gardeners, Then Mrs. Olson died, Mr. Olson moved to Florida and the last I heard he was involved with a Christian woman who didn't get along with his string-saving children. 

    I loved Mrs. Khoury and her gentle, ailing husband who would accompany her and sit quietly on a folding chair while she worked. But the compulsive couple who spent most of their time sifting the dirt to the consistency of bread flour irritated me. . "They're still here," said Fran Dutkin, one of the few remaining members of Mr. Olson's gang, "and they're still sifting." 

    So am I, trying to understand why walking through an old neighborhood makes me feel as if I am falling in love, or dying or connecting to something so powerful that it could sweep me away if I didn't keep on moving. Why am I simultaneously relieved and sad? What is it about the past that speaks to me in a way that the present cannot?

    Part of the explanation rests in the realization that what lies behind me now exceeds what lies ahead. The past exerts a stronger magnetic pull ,drawing me back and forth across a field of memories charged with love . The streets are full of stories that have found their endings. I stagger beneath the weight of them. Going back to an old neighborhood is dangerous unless you do not plan to leave.