9.17.2025

This has been my goal, to get to this house. It's rich with fruit trees and colorful decorations and framed photographs of someone else's life. A lived-in clutter I recognize. It feels familial. Open sacks of grains and flour and unidentified sauces. A freezer full of rabbit meat, which is new to me. Plants of a hardy texture I am unsure are artificial or alive. How to administer the turing test to a succulent? It's my job, my only job, to keep these things respirating. Out back lemon trees and blood oranges and an acre's worth of sweet cherry tomatoes falling off the vines crammed into a modest rectangle at a tilt. One of the owners likes to tile things. He flew back from Portavilla with a backpack full of tiles and no real plan. As a person sometimes does. I built this wall with my dad, he says, one of the last things we did together. That's when I knew how to use the tiles. We may have room in the garage for a bike if you get one, they say, and it's okay I say I know how these things go.