Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
This morning, as I feed the cats and drink my coffee, funk music starts playing in the neighborhood. It’s loud, and I am a known curmudgeon. After a while, I get dressed, draw on some eyebrows and head across the street.
“Hi!” I shout, louder than necessary at the band set up in a garage. “When you gonna be done?”
They all smile apologetically. “One more song! So sorry!”
“It’s OK,” I say. “But you know I’m always gonna investigate.” Feeling stupid, I call out, “You sound good!” and raise my arm in the air like an idiot.
Luxury condos directly across the street from us are finally complete. Our house sits downhill from the road, which always gave us a bit of privacy. Now I find myself delighted that some of the luxurious occupants of these condos will be treated to a view of my messy garden and porch. It’s partly intentional and partly because I have a high tolerance for clutter and wildness. The porch is strewn with empty cardboard boxes, half-used bags of compost and mulch, broken cat carriers and a friend’s steam cleaner, which I haven’t got around to using on my car seats. No one steals anything, perhaps because of my successful cultivation of refuse and 4-foot weeds. But I also keep it messy because I like a neighborhood with some character.
When I moved here a decade ago, most of the houses were old, like ours, which my husband bought in 2008 for next to nothing. The paperwork says it was built in 1920. A neighborhood organization sprang up in the late ’70s to get some decent roofs on people’s homes and demand the city do more about crime. They fought city hall to keep the area zoned residential and to prevent a waste treatment plant from being built where there is now a distillery. Before that — nearly a century ago — a family opened a hosiery mill just down the road. They used it to make socks worn by the first astronauts who went to the moon, and to sponsor German Jews escaping the Third Reich and gruesome, unthinkable death.
Now it’s a members-only country club for the young social elite.
Old Nashville, New Nashville. I’m weary of the conversation. Since it isn’t idiotically hot this morning, I decide to cut through the alley and walk to the neighborhood bakery. In the alley, there’s a small hill that slopes down to a ground-floor industrial building. Every year, the thistle takes over for a half-block, the spiky stems and leaves shooting taller than I am, the purple puff-balls of flowers dotting the hill. I remember when I first discovered it, how gorgeous it looked against the rusted industrial buildings, the blue sky. The bakery had not opened yet, and there was little reason to walk anywhere. There were no sidewalks, but not many cars either. No backup beepers, no cement trucks, no condos stretching skyward. Two more are being built just blocks away, but I don’t look up. I focus on the thistle, the patches of red amaranth, the Queen Anne’s lace delicately snaking through the prickly stalks.
“I’m so glad you’re here!” the woman at the bakery counter says. “We have a great new veggie sandwich that is so, so good!”
This is arguably the best bakery in town, and it opened not long after I moved here. My sense of ownership has grown stronger as the lines of patrons have grown longer. The employee’s recognition of my usual veggie-based orders makes me recall the first year of the pandemic, how they renovated the storefront to be a walk-up cafe, complete with a clear plastic shield and a two-doored pickup window. I’d go there most days of the week, and the staff would smile beneath their masks and call me by my name.
When a condo complex starts going up behind us, the thistle will be plowed down, and those luxury residents will have a direct view into my backyard — our clucking hens, the pond we dug by hand, the rotting porch, my vegetable beds. But thistle is stubborn, wild, determined to keep seeding and spreading — the stalks too prickly to be pulled up by hand. Soon goldfinches will dine like kings.
Back at home, I unwrap my sandwich. The music has stopped, but the lawn crew at the house across the street is filling in the quiet left by the band. My phone chimes. “Hey Erica!” the text says. “Sincere apologies for the loudness with the band. Thank you for coming over here and talking to us!”
Maybe I’ll straighten up the porch.
