Technically, it’s a trailer, but it scared the reptile part of my brain as it passed me in the right lane. I swear I was going 70mph. I think there is a joke about “house flies” in here somewhere, but my brain is too tired to put it together, so you’ll have to assemble that joke yourself. I have an Allen wrench if you need it.

My new apartment has a back porch which faces the back of another row of apartments in the complex, divided by a stretch of grass which probably has a proper name defined in dictionaries, but I don’t know it. This means I basically have a back yard now, a back yard that people traipse through as they please, usually with their dogs or baseball bats or Gameboys. I grew up in houses with yards and I remember school kids taking shortcuts past our statuary and I remember being a kid cutting through strangers’ flower beds, but this was all many years ago. It is odd to have a yard again and to have people pop up and pop out of my line of sight suddenly, but it is just one new thing I’ll have to adjust to, just as I am learning all the new sounds of the apartment, like the crunch of the ice maker and the dripping of the air conditioner and the thumps of our upstairs neighbors who sound like they are practicing for the International Clogging Championships.