Not Heaven or Hell, but Earth

A friend of mine once dreamed she went to hell, but it wasn’t so terrible.

In her dream, Hell looked like a prison camp with barbed wire and bleak ugly cell blocks everywhere. She found that she’d died and been sent there, along with all of her friends. The friends and she didn’t waste any time. They worked together and pooled their resources to make things bearable. Everybody was doing something to clean up the place and beautify all those dreary cells. By the end of the dream, they’d made it into quite a community. I told her that it sounded like she wasn’t describing hell at all, but earth. That’s the kind of work we’re supposed to be doing on earth. But she didn’t understand.

I think of that hell, if it really is hell, from time to time.

Yesterday afternoon, there was a knock just as I was lying down for a nap. For about about thirty seconds, I ignored it, but then my neighbor he knocked again. He always does, if the car is out front.

I opened, and greeted Jimmy’s boy by name.

“Can you come out?”

Yes, I could come out. Jimmy’s boy wanted to inspect the garden, which was all done for the year except for the cleanup. I still need to shovel a few barrows of compost onto the patch and cover the weeds with cardboard. I’ve been putting off pruning the roses and blackberries. I gave up on planting garlic, just in case Charlie the cat meddles with it, and I’m going to fence my grapes so she can’t meddle with those.

Those grape vines grew straight up the stakes, just as they were supposed to, despite my anxiety about disappointing God. Next year, we’ll trellis them across a piece of fencing. Charlie has grown as well. She was emaciated, traumatized and feisty when she first took refuge with me. Now she’s a bit too fat, and gentle with her newfound family. She doesn’t usually fight the strays who wander by the house anymore. When the neighborhood possum comes by to see if she’s left any food in her dish, she hides until he’s gone. We’re going to get her a cat house with a plug-in warming platform before long.

Jimmy’s boy wanted to know the whole plan for the garden next year. He’s been an accomplice to my plans ever since he was a preschooler. He is excited for my plot to scoop the pulp and seeds from all those different pumpkins I used for the art class right into the compost, and just see what grows next year.  I’m going to try roasting the flesh of the pumpkins in the oven to make my own pumpkin puree, and he’s excited for the pumpkin bread and pies I’ll bake as well. He wants to know when we can harvest those grapes, and what kind of popcorn I’ll grow.

The landlord’s man never came to cut down those maple trees eating the porch, so I’ve decided to try and have Jimmy do it this winter before something terrible happens. I’m already planning the bed of fragrant wildflowers in front of the house, where it’s too shady to plant anything now. I’ve got an ambition to trellis some old fashioned tea roses over the porch. What I want most of all is a wood peony, like my grandmother had in front of her house. It seems so ridiculous to make all these plans for a house that isn’t even my property. But if I live here, I want to make it a home.

I used to call Steubenville hell on earth, and it’s often been that for me. But lately, it only feels like home.

After the garden tour, and a snack of apple slices, Jimmy’s boy asked if we could go for a walk around the block.

November isn’t so good for fall colors, but it’s lots of fun for crunching leaves underfoot. Jimmy’s boy ran his bicycle over the dropped sycamore leaves while I shuffled through them in my gardening clogs. All around, the wind whipped cold and the sun was sinking fast, but I felt happy.

As we walked, I pointed out the dilapidated 1920s foursquare houses I’d buy and renovate if I had the money. That one with the yellow siding would be just gorgeous if it had a bigger yard. That one with the pink porch looked like a dollhouse, if only they hadn’t let the gutters fall in. The brick one was perfect just as it was. Jimmy’s boy asked questions as he pedaled. At first he asked questions about how I’d renovate the house and when we were going hiking at the waterfall. But then the questions turned grim.

“What happens if you breathe carbon dioxide?”

“You’re breathing it right now. Oh, you mean carbon MONoxide? You suffocate.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your body thinks you’re breathing oxygen, but it can’t use that gas to live on, so you drown in it and pass out without realizing.”

Jimmy’s boy didn’t like that idea. “An I hold my breath and cover my mouth, would I live?”

“Well, if you got out of the house fast enough, you’d live. But it’s very dangerous. Remember what I told you: if you hear the smoke alarm give off three loud beeps over and over, that’s carbon monoxide and you have to get out of the house. If the alarm just gives one long beep, that’s smoke and you have to get out.”

“An I was in the house and the alarm went off, I’d grab my rats out of the cage and run with them in my arms.”

I reminded him of the safety rule that he mustn’t take anything out of the house with him, if the smoke detector went off.

“Does monoxide blow up?” he asked, worriedly, as we rounded the bend back to our street.

“No, it doesn’t blow up. A natural gas leak could blow up, but you’d know immediately if there was one of those because natural gas smells like rotten eggs. It’s a yucky smell. Carbon monoxide doesn’t have a smell. And smoke just smells like smoke.”

Jimmy’s boy began spinning a yarn about the time he escaped a house just before the natural gas blew up, after first evacuating the children and the elderly. I praised his storytelling skills as we neared his house.

And that was when I noticed three short, electrical beeps, coming from somewhere nearby.

I turned to him. “Were you asking me those questions because you heard a smoke detector?”

“It’s been going off all day.”

“Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

It wasn’t the smoke detector at Jimmy’s house, and it wasn’t at the house next door to his. After a quick search, we realized it was coming from the rental across the way. That was the house Jimmy’s boy and I talked about buying this summer, with the green roof and trim just like a storybook cottage. The one with the vacant lot next door that would be just right for an orchard and a bigger garden, perhaps even a chicken coop. Every time the owner of the house tries again to sell it to someone, I scroll through the real estate listing and daydream about making that beautiful place my own. I would put my wood peony and my rose trellis in that yard. I’d plant a postage stamp orchard of fruit cocktail trees. I’d decorate the inside with flowered wallpaper and buy the softest calico sofa for the sitting room. I’d tend the garden all day and cook and bake in the kitchen all evening. Then I wouldn’t imagine that I lived in hell at all, because I’d be in Heaven.

A detector in that house was giving a volley of three beeps every few seconds: the warning for carbon monoxide.

“I thought that place was empty! Why would the furnace be on?”

Jimmy’s older son appeared just then. He pointed to the upper window of the house, which looked like it might have been forced.  Adrienne came looking for us a moment later and said the back door was sometimes. It wasn’t impossible that a squatter was living there and had tried to keep himself warm somehow.

I called 911.

Ms. B’s older children came biking up to watch as a ridiculously large fire truck took that terribly sharp turn down the block. Jimmy himself ran out of the house and drove the Dodge around to the backyard so he wouldn’t be trapped as the fire truck completely plugged the one-way street. The firefighters piled out, and got in the door on that sweet little porch while I cringed as if they’d dislocated my ribs.

I watched them from outside, going from room to room with their flashlights– a beam of yellow in each beautiful, beautiful window in turn. The one I wanted for my bedroom. The one that would be perfect for Adrienne’s bedroom. The gorgeous sun room where I’d keep a potted fern.

No, they didn’t find anybody passed out in the house. I didn’t save a life. It was nothing as dramatic as that. The firefighters stopped the alarm, and I suppose they notified the house’s owner of whatever was wrong. I don’t know that I’ll ever hear what happened to make the alarm go off.

I praised Jimmy’s boy for knowing what a smoke detector sounded like, but I did tell him to tell a grown up quicker next time. He promised to come by on Monday and help me bake all that pumpkin bread. Jimmy himself asked what a good time would be to come give the car a brake job. I said goodbye to Ms. B’s children, who pedaled home.

Adrienne and I went back to our house, which isn’t terribly pretty and doesn’t belong to us, where those great big trees are going to hurt the porch if we don’t do something soon.

Maybe it isn’t Heaven, but it isn’t hell either. It’s earth.

Earth isn’t a bad place at all,  when you have friends.