I can't be sure of which year it was, but I lived on Glenrosa Street in Phoenix at the time, because I remember the oleander hedge. It could have been any Christmas Eve between 2001 and 2004.
Right at midnight, I woke up, for reasons having to do with excess consumption of holiday fare. While accomplishing that mission, I heard something awful through the open bathroom window, which prudently escaped into the lush back yard.
It was a great back yard. A great property overall, if you were hungry enough, with mature pecan and carob and tangelo trees literally dropping food on the ground much of the year.
The back yard was bermed for irrigation (it's a desert thing), and during the non-existent "winters" of the broiler-pan Southwest, the oleander hedges had no problem maintaining their vegetative dignity... You can make poison out of oleander, you know.
The back yard was fenced as well as hedged and it also had an alley behind it (for the service trucks). But you couldn't see the chain link fence through the towering oleander. It is a very bush-y, very stick-y thing, damn near impenetrable. Better security than a block wall.
But you could hear through it.
On one of those Christmas Eves, at midnight, through my bathroom window, across my back yard, on the other side of that oleander hedge, I could loudly and clearly hear someone sobbing his or her heart out.
I sat there, with gifts stacked under the benignly blinking Christmas tree on the other side of my interior wall, and a broken heart on display outside. It was such a plaintive and hopeless sound in the night that it did not even draw a response from the peacekeeper dog, Ox.
I did my part, I felt, by quietly closing the window - the kind with the hinges and the little crank - and going back to bed, humming Silent Night until foggily falling back asleep.
For a long time, for many years, I did not know what could cause such uncontrollable sorrow. Of course, now I know, and this month will slowly lead to the five-year "anniversary" of my nephew Charlie's accidental death.
There is no Christmas Tree this time of year. No tinsel strands or colorful strings of lights. No artfully wrapped presents waiting to be opened.
And humming Silent Night or anything else isn't going to work, isn't going to keep my sister's voice (or my own) out of my head. The sadness can't be muted by the closing of a window. It can't be blissfully ignored due to not yet being understood.
It's not on the other side of the oleander hedge.
pH 7.o1.2o
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