It’s half past noon on the first Thursday of Summer and the sun is licking archaic rooftops and drooling on the slow shake of leaves all over Lafayette Avenue. Late for an appointment, moving in a fast step through a slow-paced place, I feel like a walking blink. I am a flesh and bone arrow slicing through the calm of splintered sidewalks and toplit pollen perched on imaginary breezes. If I were stepping along a Manhattan street right now, I would simply be another. A soul lost in the high tide of rushing bodies seeking nourishment. But I’m not in Manhattan. I’m in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and I feel like I’m anywhere but in the present – anywhere but in the fourth largest city in the world.
            This street, this place, this hour – they seem to be a severed slice of the American South sewn secretly into the middle of the New York City landscape with hopes that no one would notice. I feel that if get on my knees and scratch and claw at the concrete below me, I could strip away this country façade and reveal the underlying grit of the city, like peeling the top poster off an antique billboard.
            It is lunch hour, but the only signs of that are the quiet conversations escaping from an outdoor café clinging to one of the side streets that sneak by me. As I rush forward, I’m floating through an eclectic passageway of habitats - Italianate, neo-Greco, brownstones and frame houses lurch above my shoulders and flip-book through the corners of my eyes. All around me they speak in whispers and sighs. Dusty vignettes descend from their warped skins and open windows. Murmurs of faces seen and lives gone. Conversations of fate. Rumors of renovation. Grumbles about the weather. Some are covered in new nails and fresh layers of paint - boastful old women after a trip to the corner salon. Others crumble and tremble into fatality with each slight wind. They stand about and I slide through unnoticed - like a cup’s worth of tea poured into the Atlantic.
            And within this place that doesn’t belong, stands a corner house that doesn’t quite belong. Coated in the residue of years and faded yellow paint it’s the only vision that interrupts my afternoon charge, slowing me to a measured crawl. It is a three-story house told in two parts. The left side is pushed back far from the sidewalk – a sign that it has been there much longer than any other branch of the home. A white porch sits like an open, elderly jaw, waiting for a storyteller, a relaxer, a book reader.
            The right side of the home creeps close to the footpath. Propped up on the side of its slightly sullied, first floor window, an old American flag leans. A small garden nourishes long-trunked trees. Shadows and light loiter on its frame. Close by, on the front steps, an old woman stands. She wears clothes from another era and a stare that dips back into that same time. I find that I have so many questions for her. How long have you been here? How many years has this house stood? What is your favorite season? Why have you chosen Brooklyn? I want to squeeze a lifetime’s sum of inquiries into this thimble of happenstance. I want to sit on the coffee-colored stone stoop with her and stop this crazy rush - take in a lifetime of these afternoons, one by one. Piece by piece.
            But I go by her unnoticed. And as I resume my hurried pace, I know that if I never see her, or this house, or this intersection ever again, it will be a part of me. A cup’s worth of memories, poured slow and sweet - into the attic of my mind.