Après le Déluge

The area around my building is a little bit wild, in the sense of wildlife and wilderness. Part of the reason for this is the fact that the neighborhood is full of Vietnamese and Chinese dives, with their attendant scents and sounds: roast ducks strung up by the neck, garlic fighting decayed vegetables, odd scatterings of breadcrumbs outdoors being attacked by a legion of pigeons.

The pigeons themselves add another component: this is the type of pigeon swarm that clearly thinks with one mind. They're usually to be found in a refuse pile near an unnamed parking lot, shuffling nervously whenever someone walks by. If a car should be so audacious as to approach, or if a person does something fishy, they'll all jump into the air en masse and waft around the half-block radius between my house, the El, and a random pair of buildings. In the air they can look somewhat majestic, a giant many-membraned creature, an animal that can explode in many directions and then re-condense at a moment's notice.

I have not yet been shat upon by these pigeons. Here's to hoping.

Finally there is the peculiar weather. The weather that I walk through, the weather that I live in, is actually quite placid. There are occasional light showers, sunny skies, mild cloud cover. I'm not talking about Chicago at large, but only the neighborhood around my home.

Many a time I will walk out the door in the morning, or get off the train in the afternoon, and see streaks of water across the pavement, trees with tell-tale water-laden branches. The air will feel thick and the clouds may cluster and begin to look ominous off in the distance. But somehow I never end up caught in the rain; somehow, the rush of weather always passes and the threat is gone. I walk outside after the storm.