"What is the fastest growing hideyourawfulneighbors thing a person can plant along a fenceline, I wonder, preferably messy....hmmmm...crab trees? It occurs to me that someone got rich marketing those conifer row things as basically "your neighbors are assholes" trees, and that THAT was a good use of rage, because Goddess knows the world is short on green-space and very long on assholes. That’s my prayer for today: Please, let my rage transmute into something useful and life affirming."

That was my facebook status this morning.  And it's a baldfaced lie.  I don't want to be life affirming in the least.  What is true is that I walk out into my front yard, walk to the property line, and look up into their 75+ year old Silver Maple, and stand and hold my hand up to slice the air above my head, a good hundred feet up, straight up, a wall of death that is legally my right.  I can feel that fucking bitch watching me out the window, sweating it.  I nurse the ball of rage inside me, so DENSE after that hard winter of grief, and I think at her and at that tree "die" with all my hurt little might.

I turn and stare at their window, behind which I know sits MilknCumshot (Cal's new name for her) and the hamster, "Queenie" in her cage near the ledge.  Yesterday, I taught the fosterkid yoga again.  I wouldn't say it was a respite from my rage, it was more like a shifting of it into another color range for an hour.  I remember my hamster, "Hammie", which I had as solace through 5 long shitty childhood years.  I remember the foster kid who lived behind us whom my sister let hold my hamster one day and she threw it hardcore at the ceiling and watched it dropped.  I remember screaming.  I remember very vividly the sight of Hammie, spine snapped, dragging himself forward with this front paws (before my mother put him in the freezer for the mercy killing).  I think about those little faces yesterday, so serious and devoid of credulity, as they put their hands in prayer at the end of class and we bow to each other, "Namaste." 

I stare at my neighbor's window.  I think, "die".