2

Chapter 2

Aside from Colonel BB, I also share my block with Ethyl.  Ethyl inhabits a moldy cardboard refrigerator box beneath a stand of hack berry trees in a vacant lot next door.  Ethyl plants flowers.  She plants them everywhere.  She plants them all day long.

No one sees these flowers. By all indications, these flowers are not real.  They aren't real to the general public, I should say, but they're very real to Ethyl.  Every day, she rises from her box and absent-mindedly hums a gentle tune as she gathers her spade and watering can.  She walks to the dumpster behind the Burger Boy restaurant just down the alley and takes account of the establishment's second-hand breakfast offerings from the night before.  (You may think this grotesquely unhealthy and inhumane, but when you live in a cardboard box, many things become reasonable.)  After breakfast, Ethyl ambles up and down our street, spade and watering can in hand.  She digs out small divots of yellow grass from front lawns or loosens up asphalt from the alleys, which she tosses into the air, depositing in their place a handful of imaginary flower seeds from her faded jeans front pocket.

Ethyl looks like a mad dentist, popping out the fillings of some unlucky patient.  Her passionate belief is that she is planting beauty into the heart of an otherwise beauty-forsaken place.  Who am I to tell her any different?  And who I am to say she's wrong?

Ethyl and the Colonel don't get a long so well.