English Ivy clad the three-story brick wall hemming in the Edgewater playground, and Chicago’s breezy updrafts lifted every leaf in unison, looking like thousands of tiny green baffles rising and falling with each caprice of the wind. My fearless garrulous year-and-a-half-old grandson William worried his mamma by walking on the low walls and climbing the rain-slicked stairs, and he soaked his pants sliding into the pool gathered at the foot of the slide. (Why do playground designers always make slides that gather pools of water at the bottom?) Admiring the ivy, sticky with after-rain humidity, I called Mom and Dad to let them know I had traveled well and arrived safely and was enjoying William and his mamma and papa and their third-floor brownstone apartment and Lex the coy Maine Coon cat. (I know he likes me, or at least tolerates me, because he deigns to touch my offered nose to his, sometimes.) How nice to get away from the duties of home and caregiving for a week, and to visit a beloved daughter. The week passed in a happy instant, with long urban walks and bagels at the kosher deli and the farmers market and the annual Andersonville yard sale day, but especially reading to William and playing with William and chasing William screaming and running down the creaky hardwood hall. Sarah had looked after Mom and Dad in my absence, and when Dad had lamented over how hard it was to transport himself to the bathroom to brush his teeth after meals, she had told him about flosser-picks, and he asked Mom to ask me to get some from the store, but I had some already and could quickly deliver a bag when I returned to Utah. Flosser-picks and Mentos gum keep his teeth clean until he can take the stair lift at night to his master bath water pick. The flossers delivered, I drove away to meet some people I did not know at a local park, under a pavilion. At a friend’s suggestion, I signed up for MeetUp notices from groups that interested me, like kayaking and hiking, painting and mountain biking, and another group caught my eye, and I swallowed hard and headed into the unknown to meet people I do not know, with whom I may or may not have anything in common, to play Apples to Apples and to laugh and be pleasant and to try to remember all their names—Sally and Julie and Johnny and Greg—the names of people who, like me, had joined a MeetUp group named Introverts Who Are Not Total Hermits. Yeah, that fits. And I actually enjoyed being there with them, these people I did not know.
A Chicago wall in winter with defoliated English Ivy.
Rabbit Lane 