by keshiia rosenberg

The sweetest lemons grow on an unremarkable tree that has flourished in the mostly concrete, small backyard of 1983 San Jose Ave. It’s a brownish 3-story home built in 1916, after the great move of bodies from the Peninsula to the manufactured sleepy hollow town municipality of Colma, on the southern part of the Peninsula. It rests at the foot of Balboa Park, which when researched, was supposed to be the next great park after Golden Gate Park was opened in the late 19th Century. City archives note plans for a grand bandstand, sprawling lawns, a community swimming pool, and an athletic field. Aspirations of trees and flowers, children playing, families recreating float off the pages of this once timely article, and dissipate into the air with the faint fervor of a brass band. Once, a pond lay under it. Once, a valley of wildflowers bloomed at its side.

Deciduous, the lemons fall like the teeth of my childhood. The soft thump of one mealy dimpled thing hits the dirt patch from which it will later bloom, and I can hear the soft rind splitting. I can feel the juice running down my arm. I can smell it like I can smell the softened wood of the second floor patio my grandfather built. A thousand extra nails to keep it standing for a hundred years. I hear him tell the story over and over. I feel the wood grain underfoot.

I am standing on the back porch and looking out over six backyards. Like little berry bins side by side, sharing sinking, slanted wood fences, worn and wet looking. The moss has come up through the dirt and coated every inch of dirt and then some. Next door, a claw foot bathtub stands sentinel in the yard, portly and silent, collecting time, and grass and dirt. I envy the worms that will live and die inside of it, full lives spent circling around in a small world, so close to the precipice and so ignorant of what lay beyond the walls of their porcelain and metal universe. Living worms eating dead worms, feeding living worms. And so the cycle goes.

I’ve so rarely stood on this porch with shoes, which is strange because I’ve nurtured an unnatural fear of splinters. My cousin Cristofer was once taken to the emergency room for sliding down the garage banister of this very house after his inner thigh seamlessly allowed entry to an 8 inch splinter of the cedar variety. I heard the horror story of him crying inconsolably, while petitioning against what he was sure was his untimely death. I’m going to die! I don’t want to die! Of course, the entire debacle was somewhat of a freak accident and he did not die, and the splinter was removed, and life, as it always did, went on. This did not stop the news from being quickly disseminated from my aunt to my mother to her sister and each sister and brother from then on, until finally, it reached our small ears and was filed amongst all other childhood fears directly between “hiding in dark corners” (you could disappear forever) and the “independent disfiguration of faces” (your face could get stuck like that, you know?).

Despite this fear, the porch found me to be brave each time, if only for that time, bare foot and defiant, staring out into the short and long expanse of the South San Francisco neighborhood. Unimpressive, but wholly beautiful, and wholly full. My whole history in miniature.

Sounds of my childhood play in a loop in my mind. Tinkling and tinny, like soft wind chimes, brass not wood, or little birds far off somewhere, so lovely you can somewhat make out the noise without fully understanding the source. Upstairs, in 1995, we are screaming, piled onto the ripping wicker rocking chair, swaying dangerously forward and backward. There is a storm and we are weathering it, all five of us, foot to knee to leg to arm. Our elbows are sails and we are ships that will make it. We are going to make it! We scream and scream and scream because this is the only way we know how to survive. We are not phased by the blood. We are not phased by the death. The pornography does not plague us. The abuse feels like love. Somewhere in 1989, my mother strokes my hair and dreams up things I will never do.

In Ruth’s garden, a cat cleans his paws. His matted, overgrown fur is the animalistic rendering of the ferny and wild weeds encroaching over every square inch of her yard. I wonder if he knows the secrets we’ve spent decades whispering into the walls. Our home casts a shadow in which he creeps.

I stand there, on our porch in the city, in our bubble just like I stood once 20 years ago, and 10 years ago, and 3 years ago, and now. I stand there like I will in 3 years and 10 years and 20 years and in all moments, for all eternity. I will be the ghost that haunts it’s halls. I will be the shepherd at its doors.