A for sale sign went up on my neighbor’s lawn yesterday. Our neighborhood is tight, so much so that Paul and I share a driveway with these folks, or we will for a few more weeks.
“I hope the new neighbors are nice,” I said to Paul, screwing up a smile of apprehension and hope.
He shrugged his own hope and anxiousness.
We decided together that in the spirit of fair play, we would let anyone looking at the place next door see who we were, their potential neighbors. Putting our best faces on, so to speak. So we cleaned up a weed patch along the shared driveway and planted vegetables: two kinds of peppers, dill, lemon cucumber, and rosemary. A sunflower and red hibiscus for the front yard.
Then we pasted two posters on our glass front door: Black Lives Matter and a Pride rainbow flag.
Declarations are important. The upcoming holiday, Independence Day, is all about declaration. In the original text, certain words are capitalized: Order, Union, Justice, Tranquility, Welfare, Blessings, Liberty, Posterity.
As any writer knows, to capitalize a word mid-sentence gives it added emphasis. This is what the founders – free upper-class, educated white men, who preserved slavery and refused non-white men and women the vote – emphasized. Still, with all of their intersectional blindness, they left us with abstractions for which we still strive today, but abstractions, which even they must have known, are not necessarily in concert with each other.
Justice and Tranquility often do not pedal a tandem bike. Order and Liberty can come to blows.
This week, as we head into a new month, a month where summer steams around our ankles and the sun presses hot hands onto our shoulders, a month where we look back from whence our country came, I’m posting some of the first I-Blame-the-Quarantine missives sent to me.
See how far we’ve come. See how little we’ve traveled.
–KLB