Ode to Lafayette

This morning, I didn't feel like pulling out the patio furniture since we're supposed to get thunderstorms later. So instead I opened the back door and sat just inside, an eye open for curious animals and carpenter bees, while indulging in a hot breakfast instead of my usual weekday fruit and yogurt.

I'm 24 hours away from the weekly Los Angeles weather and Covid review, when I get to decide if I'm ready to go back or extend yet another week.

The other coast is a great place to be from November to April/May, but right now it's been unruly. I thumb-typed the below text out a few weeks ago and just now went back to it. I'm not getting into the age-old battle of NYC vs. LA. I understand we're in this together and the real story is if you prefer urban or rural. But I do like a bit of weather.

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I awoke at 3 to the loud rapping of hard rain on the downspout outside my window. The smell of wet and green permeated the fresh air. I’d only slept one night here with the windows closed and the a/c unit on. 

The rhythmic sounds and smell of grass, leaves, and moss were glorious after so many months in a dry climate, one where sleeping with the windows open only results in a veneer of dust from the 134.

I lay awake until 7, then finally dressed and left my house. The rain had stopped and I could hear a cord banging against a flagpole, as well as the sound of distant air conditioners and the blaring warning that the street cleaners were en route to a nearby block. A graying old man in a beret whizzed down the sidewalk on an electric scooter. Cops were double-parked outside Martha’s, picking up breakfast. Martha's is one of our local Black-owned businesses. I headed around the corner to another, The Grind, the most perfect coffee shop run by another Hamilton Park transplant...it opened up in Bergen-Lafayette about six months after I bought the house.

The afternoon I moved in, there was a riot of high school girls and their mothers, fighting in front of my house. That day, the cops had not come to Lafayette Street looking for breakfast or coffee. And what I'd said to Michael Kraiger that day, when he was helping me move was "Oh no, not again." I grew up on a street where screaming matches and violence were fairly common. I knew the drill. Stay inside. Stay out of it. Don't let on you're the one that called the cops.

But that hadn't happened again. A one-off, perhaps a misunderstanding. All I have now is the sound of the street cleaners, the neighbors talking to each other, the cicadas buzzing, and sometimes, rain hitting the downspout outside my window.