(This started as a joke. Half my neighborhood and most of my friends are, it seems, out of town. Even Elizabeth is in France. So I was meaning to write some dumb parody of McCarthy and the relative desolation of the streets here in the neighborhood, Central Gardens. And, it’s true, I’m still joking. But less than I meant.)

Bright, beautiful and desolate, the neighborhood continues on without your presence. But only as a shallow, meager impersonation of itself.

Promotional literature for Avon products hangs, untouched, on doorknobs up and down the streets, rocking in the wind that comes, unusually, from the East. The Stilwells’ newspaper sits − in its dead and printed form − in their otherwise unused driveway. An announcement of a new upper crust restaurant called The Upper Crust opening at Cleveland and Vance filters into mailboxes, but there’s no one with which to talk about these things.

There’s a sudden lack of irony in the neighborhood. A softening of the tone. An emptying of the usually quick and sharp attitude. Where does one go for a release?

I received an invitation to my own reading today, but could find no means of interacting with anyone, in any way, about this expected but nonetheless surprising development.

Another neighbor moves a seemingly endless array of cars from driveway to garage to the street and then back, sometimes dropping one sedan from the rotation and parking it as a silent guard in his neighbor’s abandoned driveway, that neighbor having moved for these few weeks to their home in South Carolina. The neighbor move his cars in triangles, it seems, though from time to time he varies the pattern with a parallel maneuver and once this weekend he seemed to improvise a shift that transported the whole host of vehicles in a slowly synchronized right angle.

Whenever I see him finishing another move of one of the vehicles, he is, always, walking away from me.

I find myself wanting to throw large and unused items into the dumpster that’s no longer on the street, an almost industrial-sized container that sat for nearly a year in front of the neighbor’s house during their renovation. I miss the portable toilet whose only remnant is the square, yellowed patch of grass on the median. I miss the parade of chain-smoking contractors who, every day, left fast food wrappers on my yard. I miss the very early mornings when the workers would sit, very still, in their nearly broken down old cars, sometimes sitting and smoking and eating in silence for an hour or more, waiting for the never outwardly transparent cue to begin their work.

Our cat sits at the window and cries. Other cats tumble in fights from the bushes and land, confused, in the remarkably sunny but deserted street. My friend Paul passes by in Elizabeth’s old car, which we sold to him for $1. It’s an arguably iconic old Pathfinder that’s travelled Central Gardens for nearly 15 years, covered as it is in bumper stickers about witches and UVA. People tell us we look alike, me and Paul, and so the possibilities for confusion are deep. He left me a voicemail telling me that when people pull up next him at a stoplight in the area, they are often startled, a little scared, because they realize the driver isn’t Elizabeth, who maybe they’ve never known but who they’ve recognized as the driver of that car for these many years. And yet instead there is no Elizabeth in the driver’s seat, but only someone who looks vaguely like what they’d assumed is her newest husband.

The car is also infested with ants. Often, while driving, he’ll find ants crawling up his arm.

I find a deeper calm in trimming the hedges, chopping branches from our trees, and I wonder if this is how it started for the older neighbor living next door. That inner peace he has. That certain calm. The way he channels Ghandi as he sweeps those leaves into little piles.

The weather has yet to turn painfully hot. The grass grows at an unnatural pace. No one has seen or heard from Tom or Patti on the corner in what must be weeks or even months.

A very well-designed sticker appeared on the sides of all the trash cans yesterday, announcing that, very soon, our trash day will be Friday, not Monday. But there was no explanation for the change.

I miss everyone.

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