Cool Hood

Now that the heat has been turned down, in fact, it seems off, the hood is popping. Hag came out while Mom was in the garden doing her favorite thing, weed abatement. The woman is a human tractor at pulling up weeds. While among the tomatoes and peppers, in her Asian-squat position, with a pair of scissors and a screwdriver (her father showed her how to pull up weeds with a screwdriver) Mom watched the wooden gates of Hag Hideaway open to the alley.

A bony hand clasped the gate and pushed it opened before Hag appeared. Our neighbor, eternally fixing his place up for rent, although it never has been rented as yet, was in his backyard. He is directly behind Hag Hideaway and Hag, with bent back, walked to his side and asked if his mother would be moving in.

He was unsure, his mother hadn't made up her mind as yet.

Hag was obviously disappointed because she was hoping to have another hag in the hood. There are fewer and fewer hags hanging in the hood. Someone, I suppose someone, is poisoning them. It's hard to poison hags, I know, after supplying Hag with a can of flea spray for her omelet of eggs that she needed for a recipes. Yet it appears they are slipping away, one hag at a time.

It's not that Hag likes company, but there is nothing like a familiar face, another haggard being to wave hello or swap tales while shuffling about the hood looking for hanging fruit or cans in the trash. There is another hag living on the next street. She is as almost toothless, and a keeper of lost dogs. She shuns the public, another trait of hags and seeks the company of abandoned pets. She is a good hag. Her family cared for from miles and miles of walking the hood in search of recyclables, her train of lost dogs near her and they don't bark. I don't know how she does it, but as quiet as a hag can be, and they are quiet, she opens the lids of trash bins while her furry crew mill about, silent as fog.

I see her every once in a while and, when on a walk, found her hideaway. A comfortable and respectful hag home. Overgrown shrubs, how they love their overgrown shrubs and tightly curtained windows, the building in need of paint. As if no one lived there, one would think, someone as silly as a child.

Yes indeed, a place for children to gawk at and make dares for others to cross. And they always take the dare--children, a hag's favorite meal, to roast with roots and forest herbs. But the rest of us know. Those of us that survived a dare to cross over and enter a hag hideout. Where spiders and lizards run rampant. Where only  Black Widows, with their hour glass mark, are tickled to turn pages in dusty books. Who could forget the unmistakable smell  of a silly child roasting in an iron pot?

Not I.