A foggy haze, a pall, hangs pinkly across the brambles by the highway. An old man—or perhaps he is just carrying himself that way, hunched over with slow careful movements, and perhaps he is not a man at all, but he looks to be old from this distance, so maybe it is merely my faltering eyesight, maybe it is the work of the morning haze, although the haze appears to be limited to the skyward direction, apparent only in the leading edge of the sun that has yet to crest the hillside beyond the brambles, beyond the highway—swings open the large metal gates, gates painted in the off-orange color of the Golden Gate Bridge, and locks them against their posts on the outside of the private gravel road that connects the street with the parking lot shared by the cannabis shop and the small coffee shack along the highway.
I am surprised by this, by the old man—if he is really a man, and if he really is old. His car is still running, pulled partially into the road—really a large driveway—and I can see the foggy effluence from the exhaust. It is an old man’s car, a large white vehicle, perhaps ten years old, that looks like it might have been a luxury model, or what passes for that these days. The fact that he is old surprises me. The cannabis shop and the coffee shack are the only businesses served by this road, and, space wise, the cannabis shop dominates. It is a narrow modular—essentially a trailer—with a large older motor home behind it, presumably so that the owners or someone in their employ can spend the night on the property to lessen the temptation for theft that a cannabis shop represents. The coffee shack is little more than a prefab wooden shed, like one you might see in a back yard filled with a riding lawn mower and miscellaneous yard tools. It is painted a happy blue with white trim. Last year it had a different name as was painted hot pink, although the menu on the front hasn’t changed. I am surprised he is old because cannabis is a young-person’s business, in my mind at least, and he appears to be a respectable older gentleman. But, again, my failing eyesight and the distance render my judgement suspect. And the world is not at all the same place as it was when my stereotypes about age and cannabis were first formed.
The only other visible living things, besides me, the dog, and the old man, and a crow on the road behind the old man and his car, are the spiders in large webs displayed like dream catchers, draped in silver and rendered opaque this morning by the dew, each with their sole occupant positioned in the exact center like the frayed bullseye of a cracked dart board. There are four of them as I exit the breezeway connecting the apartment building to the adjacent covered parking area. They are suspended between the building and a large cluster of ornamental shrubs. Each is arranged vertically, but angled differently, as if reflecting four facets of a gemstone. They shimmer like gems in the pink-tinged pre-sunshine, but are otherwise perfectly motionless. Together they form a column-shaped gauntlet with no clearly discernible entrance and death as the only possible exit.
