cane While trimming the beautiful, flowering, bush in our front yard–the one that eloquently covers part of our bedroom window–Josh found a cane. It’s a standard, wood, old man-type of cane. He claims it was just hanging on a branch inside the bush. Where did this cane come from? Did some man hide it in our bush only to forget about it later? Perhaps it fell out of the second story window and landed inside the bush. I’ve found small children’s toys, girl’s barrettes, and broken dishes in the gutter and inside the soil below the second story window. A cane is an entirely new find.

The cane is now hanging on our metal stair banister leading up to our front porch. It serves as our talisman, protecting us from the uncertainty we feel in this neighborhood. Random bursts of mysterious gunfire, unfounded, usually with no targets but a random house, have plagued the south end for the past few months. When I am in my darkest moments, usually in the middle of the night, when I am unable to sleep, I calculate the foolish position of our bed. It sits right in front of the house, right near the front window, an easy path. My body is the closest to the wall, therefore, closest to the street. I have unwittingly offered myself up as a human shield for my husband, although not my cat–she rests beside me. Ah, so the cat would be the buffer if a mysterious round of bullets were to hail down upon the house. Or, wait, no…the flowering bush in front of our bedroom window would deflect gunfire first. But is that even possible? And then my mind scolds myself for being so morbid. I make half-hearted calculations in my head about the likelihood that our house would ever be involved in a drive-by. I say half-hearted because my math is poor and instead of some sort of million to one ratio, my mind usually conjures some sort of mental pie chart showing a tiny sliver of chance in the corner of the pie.

“How did I GET here?” I sometimes wonder late at night. “How did I end up in a place where calculating my risk of gunfire is even plausible?” Sure, we made this choice back when the neighborhood was transitioning instead of slowly sliding backward. My secret enjoyment of drama allows me to entertain such deliciously terrible fantasies of danger and gunfire. But my sense of adventure is not appeased…I want quiet and peace. And that’s when my mind shifts into sleep and the wooden cane hanging from my banister dangles throughout the quiet, undisturbed night.