Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

“Is that Lorena?”  My husband is half-in, half-out the front door, screen bumping at his back. “Lorena?”  “You know, the woman in black. With the boots.” I look over his shoulder and he’s right. It is Lorena, standing on the corner across from our apartment building in the dying light.  From a distance, standing still, she’s a fashion plate in her black Michael Kors trench coat. It’s slim cut and cinched at the waist, hitting her legs just above the knees. She has black knee high boots with chunky heels that she wears year round, spring, summer, winter and fall. Up close her black dyed hair is grey at the roots, her raincoat is streaked with grime. When she walks she totters along like those Chinese women with their bound and tortured feet used to do, inch by painful looking inch. Standing on the corner now, she has her purse open on the sidewalk at her feet. Her head spins from side to side, looking up and down the street. I know her to say hello...

Living in the little house on the hill for six straight years was a gift. That's not quite hyperbole. We got the Mountain View house - #33 in the list of places I've called home -  when our good friends, Mike and Judy, found their dream home and moved out of the Mar Vista bungalow they'd been renting. They recommended us to the landlords as the perfect tenants; that perfection being a bit of a stretch considering the house was going to cost us a challenging $300 more every month than what we were paying for our townhouse. We signed the lease with the owners, dropping us within the boundary lines for our school of choice just days before the deadline to register for a coveted kindergarden spot in the fall. It had happened organically, inevitably; exactly as I'd laid it out on my treasure map. A couple of years before then, back when Mike and Judy were only dreaming of homes, I was dreaming too.  Using a photograph Judy had taken one afternoon of Mark, Russell and me st...

#33: Mountain View Avenue, Mar Vista, California Next door to our little house on the hill in Mar Vista there lived a very old couple. Among the first to move in during the post war building boom in the early 1950's, Bob and Helen saw little three bedroom bungalows springing up all over Los Angeles. Back then you could still see the Pacific coast from their front yard, and behind them the orange groves spread clear to Los Angeles.  Their love story isn't a story at all, it's the real deal. Untitled Love Story The coleus under Bob and Helen’s front porch window are looking a little scraggly, nothing but tall leggy stems bending in their bed of dry cracked earth. I think how the gardener wouldn’t let them go like that if Bob hadn’t been so sick. If he’d been up and around, those plants would be standing tall, their leaves firm and perky, the ground blanketed with a soft, moist layer of mulch. Well tended, that was the best way to describe Bob’s garden, and come to thin...