I was musing the other day, about how lovely it is to be out in the backyard now. Things are quiet, except for the sweet twittering of birds, the rustle of the breeze and the occasional drone of lawnmowers. For many years, however, this was not the case.
Screams, cursing, incessant barking and bad, top forty music filled the air on our part of the street, every sunny day before the neighbors from hell finally moved away.
Things had started to go downhill when the girl who'd grown up next door found that she was expecting a child, and decided to move back in with her parents, who happened to be our neighbors. Along with her other baggage, she brought the father of her child with her and a backyard wedding soon took place. Within two years, they had two sons. Her parents had never bothered us in the least, but this couple and their sons were to become the bane of our existence.
Things weren't so bad at first. While the children were very young, the worst thing was that the couple screamed at each other frequently and for long periods of time. The sound of swearing and doors slamming was the norm during good weather. It almost made us appreciate winter when they stayed inside with the windows shut so we didn't have to listen to it.
They also had a love of placing a radio out on their patio in the summer, turning the volume up as high as it would go. The cacophony would continue all day and into the evening. They'd frequently go inside and forget about it, leaving it on, blaring away, to torture the entire neighborhood.
They also had a series of dogs during their nearly two decade occupation of that house. The poor animals spent most of their lives tied up next to the back door. The family would go out for the day or the evening and leave the dog tied outside all alone, to bark pitifully, for hours. The first one they had was given up for adoption after they found him too difficult to handle. The second met his fate in the form of a car on the busy street out in front of the house. The third simply disappeared one day, and was never seen or mentioned again. I've never understood why someone would bring a dog home in the first place, just to scream at it, kick it and ignore it the rest of the time. They never played with them or walked them. It was sad.
The real trouble began when the two boys reached school age. I remember an early incident when my daughter had just gotten her first "big-girl" bike. It was her birthday and she was outside, proudly showing off her new, pink and white two-wheeler with the flowered basket. Suddenly she ran into the house, crying. I got to the window in time to see the two boys heaping black mud onto the bicycle, which was on its side in the grass. From then on, it was an endless series of problems with those two boys. Neighborhood soccer games always ended in fights and tears, our house was egged, and the barn windows were broken too many times to count. My husband Mac started a golf ball collection with all the ones he found in the yard, or amid shards of glass on the barn floor.
We'd started out on friendly terms with them. We tried to be neighborly. I watched the boys before school and got them on the bus when the parents had to be to work early. When a big tree came down in their yard during a hurricane, Mac went over with his chainsaw and spent hours cutting it up for them. We did our best to be kind and cordial, but it became more difficult with each passing year.
A favorite game of the two boys was "army". It involved running and screaming through their yard and ours, with toy rifles and machine guns, pretending to kill one another. This happened almost daily and lasted well into their high school years. In junior high, they once again targeted my daughter, taunting her on the school bus, and yelling things at her whenever they saw her outside. When they were in high school, they started a campaign of cyber-harassment, sending her instant messages, pretending to be an anonymous girl who was supposedly dating my daughter's boyfriend. This continued until we got proof that it was them, and let them know about it.
Late one night, Mac was coming in from the barn and saw them with a few of their friends, and their father, huddled in the backyard, passing around a pipe. I'm guessing it wasn't a peace pipe ceremony. Another morning, just at dawn, Mac stepped outside and observed the father out in his yard, vomiting into the bushes. So this was the role-model these kids had grown up with. Meanwhile, the screaming and slamming of doors continued, only now the two sons joined in.
One fine summer day, I was sitting under a tree, reading in the yard. My neighbor was mowing his lawn, and he stopped to inspect some pine trees I had recently planted near the property line. He got down on one knee and was really studying them. He didn't notice me sitting in the relative darkness of the shade, a dozen yards away. He finally went back to his mowing, but the incident stayed with me. The more I thought about it, the more odd it seemed, and I finally went back there myself to look at the trees and see what was so interesting. When I did, I saw that the needles were turning brown and all the trees looked sick. There was a grayish-white powder packed around the base of each tree, and when I scooped up a handful, I was overcome with a strong, chemical smell. It was either a weedkiller or more likely, chlorine. Our neighbors had a swimming pool in their yard. As strange and unbelievable as it seemed, our neighbor had apparently poisoned our trees.
Then, I recalled how our rabbits had mysteriously died. We'd had three rabbits over the past few years, and Mac had built a beautiful wooden hutch for them, out behind the barn. All of them had died, one by one, for no apparent reason, although two of them had been relatively young. We just went out to feed them in the morning and found them cold and stiff. Now I had to wonder if my neighbor had poisoned our rabbits as well as our trees.
I called him on the telephone and casually told him that we'd inexplicably found chlorine in the soil around our trees, and I wanted to make him aware of it. I suggested that he make sure his pool shed and all his chemicals were safely locked up. I stopped short of accusing him. Wow! He had no idea how THAT had happened. He thanked me for alerting him.
It was about four years ago that the "For Sale" sign went up on the front lawn next door. The youngest son was graduating from high school, and having had enough, his mother had filed for divorce. His grandfather had recently passed away, and grandma put the house on the market. The neighborhood breathed a collective sigh of relief, as the moving van pulled away from the curb in front of their house that fall. A nice young couple moved in shortly thereafter, along with their little Shih Tzu. The neighborhood is peaceful again. It's a joy to be out in the yard now, enjoying the sounds of tree frogs and mockingbirds, just breathing in the calm. It feels like heaven once more.
It's a mystery to me, how people can live in such discord and misery of their own making, but obviously, some do.
Once, there was a dark city. Three rivers ran through it, but long ago, misguided city fathers had covered them up, channeling them underground. When the city finally underwent a long-awaited renaissance, the rivers were uncovered. To celebrate the new life of the city and the liberation of its rivers from their cement shrouds, braziers were erected in the river and filled with wood, to be set ablaze on temperate nights while drums thunder and flutes play. Voices would fill the night air with ancient sounding, harmonic chants mingling with trails of sparks blowing in warm zephyrs off the river. Gondolas would ply the waters and the people would come from many miles around to join the residents of the city in the ritual celebrating the rebirth of Providence, Rhode Island. The people call this beautiful, primal rite “Waterfire”.
On Saturday evening, I was there at the water’s edge, sitting on the cool granite walls of the canal with thousands of others, waiting in anticipation of dusk. Then, at the exact moment of sunset, the sound of drums began and rose up above the waters. A black skiff appeared out of the shadows, carrying several black-robed figures. With torch in hand, one of them set the first brazier basket on fire as deep, booming voices began a chant. The festival had begun. The dark boat glided by, lighting each brazier as they went. As the river lit up with the flames, the granite walls of the canal began to glow pink and the warmth suffused us as we looked on, sipping red wine and nibbling pastries. A fire juggler appeared on a stone peninsula, cups of flame on gold chains, swirling around his bronze torso. A gondola approached, carrying a couple downriver. The gondolier wore a straw hat, and a black and white striped jersey. He poled his craft slowly along aside the flaming baskets. Next came a black skiff carrying a old man with long silver hair, dressed all in white. He handed out long-stemmed, red roses to random people who reached out over the water toward him as the deep, harmonic sounds of “Halleluyah”, by David Hykes boomed out across the river.
The warm breeze sent a spangled ribbon of sparks cascading from each of the flaming braziers as my companions and I rose to walk along Canal Street, toward Memorial Park. There, at the dimly lit World War I monument, a group of statues would come to life this night. We had to see for ourselves. Sure enough, there we found a gargoyle, a Viking, a Valkyrie, a Grecian goddess, and a few other marble statues. As we watched, they suddenly came to life and slowly began to move, presenting onlookers with small scrolls containing oracles in exchange for dollar bills. The sound of “Nepalese Lullaby” by Neelam Shestha, floated on the night wind as we sauntered down to Market Square and the Rhode Island School of Design. We were surrounded by a gentle sea of humanity; all ages genders and races, ebbing and flowing, mingling happily on the granite waterfront. Dogs of every description, large and small, sauntered along with their owners, taking in the sights and sounds. There were carts selling all kinds of food and drink along the way, and the delicious smells mingled with the aroma of the wood smoke from the river. Artisan vendors offered their wares at tents set up on the side streets surrounding the waterfront area - glass jewelry, artwork and henna tattoos. Wine, beer and cocktails were served up as Dance lessons, Jazz bands, origami artists and mimes carried on nearby. It's all part of the scene on various nights during the season. Further along, toward the bridge we found a forest of trees hung with blue illuminated stars, twisting in the night breeze. I was told that these represented donations to cancer research. They created a magical grove near the fountain in Memorial Park.
There is no admission charged for Waterfire; hundreds of volunteers and many more generous financial benefactors make it all possible. Waterfire is the inspired, artistic concept designed by Barnaby Evans, to celebrate the rebirth of the city of Providence. It is called an "installation piece", and some refer to it as a sculpture. By bringing together the two opposing elements of fire and water, Mr. Evans found a way to draw the people back to the heart of this beautiful port city. The sublime and intricate architecture of the older buildings, and the glass, polished stone and steel of the city's newer skyscrapers are illuminated by one hundred bonfires and reflect back their light, along with the rippling river surface. An ethereal mood fills the city on the nights when Waterfire happens in Providence.
A Vivaldi piece ends and a traditional Navajo song begins as we stroll across the Washington Street bridge and move (very slowly) toward the car. The black robed figures in the dark boats will continue to feed the flames until midnight.
This was only one of many magical Waterfire nights each year. I have never been part of a more amazing happening of peaceful joy and sublime fun. My companions and I will be back, over and over again to be a part of the ritual and behold the spectacle that is Waterfire.
What better way to welcome summer back to New England?
