I must live in the right kind of neighborhood. I sit at the kitchen table and work most days with the curtains open, bay windows looking out at the street. It's a quiet suburban block and you'd think I'd know most of the neighbors but I don't. I know the ones on either side of me and directly across the street. I have met the guy across the alley behind me, we bump into each other sometimes taking out the trash and we chat a little. But I am mostly happy to work alone and don't really want to have a bunch of people who feel like they can barge in or interrupt me whenever they feel like it.
The good part is that there seem to be a lot of nice-looking women in the neighborhood, and they parade past my window throughout the day. Basically two scenarios: exercise walkers and dog walkers. Some of the ones walking for exercise, I hate to say it, really need it. They huff and puff around the block in their sweat suits and, bless their hearts, I hope it works. Then there are the other type, with the stylish headband, the FitBit on their arm, a cute outfit, name-brand shoes. These outfits tend to be skin-tight, often reflecting the light to emphasize the shape of the underlying musculature, often with little straps and designed to allow refreshing cool air to breeze over the chest area. Lots of skin, neat makeup, stylish hair, sometimes a ponytail bouncing as they stride along. Again, bless their hearts. But in a different way.
The dog-walkers are a different sort. One lady walks her dog every morning in flannel pajamas with fuzzy slippers. Another rigs herself as if she was going into the mountains, with a fanny-pack, a broad-brimmed hat, water bottle; that one walks two dogs and though there is something eye-catching about her she seems very mission-oriented, yanking on the leashes, walking fast behind their pull. It looks like most of the dog-walking women of my neighborhood just go out in whatever they were wearing when the dog got restless. Unlike the exercisers they don't make a fashion statement out of it. The dog needs to go out, they get up from what they're doing, clip a leash on Fido, and out they go.
And it seems that a lot of women do not really believe in wearing a lot of clothes around the house. Bras in particular are not a necessity if you're just hanging around the house by yourself. Shorts are comfortable, sandals, a practical hair tie to keep your hair out of your face. Our neighborhood is not like parading down Fifth Avenue or something, where you'd get all dressed up. During the day most of the houses don't have anybody in them, there is almost no automobile traffic on these little streets, nobody's looking. You walk the dog in your pajamas, absolutely nobody cares. So sitting in front of my big window I see jiggling young women walking their dogs around the block in tank tops, tube tops, halter tops, tops that are skinny straps and a couple of patches of fabric to make it legal, little belly-revealing t-shirts, shorts. I consider this a definite benefit of working from home, or WFH as we call it since the pandemic started.
My dog Flyer needs to go out a few times a day, too, and that's another benefit. It gets me off my ass and out into the fresh air. He's the kind of mutt who wants to chase squirrels and leaves that blow in the wind, and birds. When he sees another dog he gets excited and starts barking ferociously and yanking at his leash, but even though there may be times when I wouldn't mind if we both touched noses with a neighbor, I can't usually trust him to be a good boy. The neighborhood has a kind of mutually-agreed-upon norm of crossing the street or turning a corner to avoid doggy congestion. Which is a long way of saying, I guess, that I do not know any of these lovely women who I see outside my window.
This one particular day we had a beautiful sunny morning, and then some clouds came in around lunchtime. I made myself a meal and finished a page of a project, then threw Flyer on the leash. We have not had much rain but it could happen and I don't want to have to take him out to shit in the rain, you know? There are some dogs that love the water: Flyer does not. One little raindrop and he's ready to go back inside. I'm pretty much like that, too.
There are some woods near my block, and I walk him over there. I don't worry if he poops in the tall grass next to the forest, because nobody ever walks there. And the deer do it, rabbits do it, foxes and raccoons do it. I know I am a bad citizen but I let him poop where nobody will step in it, and I usually don't pick it up. He loves walking there too, because there are great smells of wildlife and sounds up in the trees and in the thickets. I am daydreaming about dumb stuff and he is having the time of his life with all that excitement, bouncing around on the end of his leash smelling stuff and peeing on stuff. Once he has pooped we usually come back out to the street and then roam the neighborhood a little bit, like I say, avoiding confrontations with other dogs, working our way back home to my computer and livelihood.
Flyer had done his business and was still wound up, so we headed off down Miranda Street toward Hughes. All of these are just houses, there are no businesses, also very little vehicular traffic, this is just a "bedroom community," as they say. During the day most of the houses are empty, everybody's at work. We went down Hughes to Justin Drive, which connects with Tryer at the end of the block. Whatever, you don't need to know that.
I have heard of this before but had never seen it happen. We had some scattered clouds and a nice breeze, then with absolutely no warning a heavy wind kicked up and it started pouring, all within a second. There was no preliminary sprinkle or breeze, no warning, this rainstorm had a crisp sharp edge and in an instant we were in it, with rain pounding down on me and Flyer.
The dog looked at me and started whining. I said, "I know, Flyer, this is bad. We need to get home." But home was early five blocks away, and we were already getting drenched. Flyer started tugging at his leash, pulling me toward our house, and I followed, almost trotting along the sidewalk. The poor puppy was soaked already, and so was I. My t-shirt was sticking to me, my tennis shoes were like sponges. You couldn't see to the end of the block, rain was falling so heavily, and with the wind there would be sideways moments when the water got into any place it might have missed when it was falling straight down. Water was running into my eyes and down the inside of my clothes, splashing when I took a step. I didn't want to run on the wet sidewalk but we walked fast.
About half a block down Justin Drive I saw a For Sale sign on a house that looked empty; I could see through the front window that there was no furniture. Even better, there was a covered front porch, with screen along one half of it. I didn't want to break into the place, but given the circumstances it seemed reasonable to try the door to the porch. Flyer scrambled with me up the stairs and I turned the knob and lo and behold the door opened into a nice, cozy, snug -- dry -- porch.
With the wind, a good amount of water was blowing through the screen, but the other side of the porch was enclosed, and the rain did not reach that side. It was a little dark -- I assumed the electricity had been turned off -- but it was nice and dry and it had a funky little sofa, with a little bit of junk back in the corner where maybe some contractors had left it. There was a row of coat-hooks on the wall, mounted on a long board screwed into unfinished two-by-fours. I imagined a family coming in from the cold, hanging their jackets in a nice neat order, mom and dad and a row of the rug-rats.
Flyer started shaking himself dry, like dogs do, and water was flying everywhere. I said to him (I do talk to my dog, you know), "Man, Flyer, I wish I could do that." I was too wet to sit on that couch, and figured I would just stand there and wait while Flyer napped on the floor. I tried the door to the interior of the house but it was locked. Just as well, that could look like breaking and entering, or at least trespassing if somebody found me in there. Hanging out on the porch during a sudden storm was easily justifiable, in case somebody called the cops or an alarm went off or something. As fast as this storm came upon us, it could disappear just as fast and we'd be out of here.
Flyer look around a little bit, made himself comfortable in the corner, and curled up with his tail over his face, while I stood in the middle of the area, freezing. I took off my shoes and set them upside down near the wall, thinking they'd dry better that way (I can't explain that, it just seemed like they would). I unrolled my socks and decided to hang them from the coat rack. I put them at the far left, one hook for each, being kind of obsessive in that way. I checked my phone, which was in my back pocket, and it worked. I blew on it to dry it off a little bit, but it wasn't bad.
I was shivering near the point of convulsing. It was not really a cold day but between the wind whipping through the screen and being soaked, I was chilled. I tried taking off my t-shirt and discovered that I was significantly warmer without it. I walked over to the wet side, where the screens were, and wrung it out on the indoor-outdoor carpet, then hung it up using the next two hooks so it could spread out a little and maybe dry faster.
The porch seemed to have a metal roof, the way the rain pounded on it. There was a constant roar, and now it was punctuated with thunder, rolls at first and then crashes nearby. Now and then the shadows were illuminated with lightning flashes. I realized I might be here for a while, maybe long enough for my clothes to dry. Wouldn't that be nice, to walk home all nice and dry? After some consideration, given that I was in a completely private space in an unoccupied house in the middle of a blinding rainstorm, I pulled off my blue jeans and hung them up, hooking two belt loops over the next two hooks.
So there I was in my soaking wet tighty-whiteys, me and Flyer. I thought about hanging up my underwear to dry, too, as they were also soaked. Should I? What if somebody were to come? It would be pretty hard to explain why I was in a stranger's house naked. On the other hand, why in the world would anybody come? No realtor is going to show this place in a heavy storm. And is standing there in my underwear actually more defensible? If somebody came, I would hear the car, the door, probably some sounds. Flyer would certainly bark. I walked over to the screened side and leaned over to look out without exposing myself. I could barely see the house across the street through the downpour. There was absolutely no traffic on the street, obviously nobody out walking. I couldn't sit on somebody's sofa in wet underwear. And so -- off they went, to the next two hooks. My clothes were taking up nearly half that homemade rack, and I was bare-ass naked in a nice cozy hideout during a terrible rainstorm.
I sat on the couch and looked at my phone. I had no texts, no new email, so I opened up Threads, the new social media site that I liked since Twitter went to hell, and started scrolling through. There was an empty paint bucket in the corner that I put in front of the sofa for a footstool, and so Flyer and I settled in to wait. It was pretty cozy.
I read news and sports for, I guess, five minutes, lost in it, forgetting about the storm, when suddenly pandemonium hit.
