Our deck is the reason we bought this place.

I didn’t want to live this close to work.  I feared running into clients all the time, while I was sweaty and gross and hadn’t shaved my legs.  I feared the magic would be gone.

As it turned out, I don’t run into clients all that much. I guess we don’t travel in the same circles much. Occasionally I run into one or two at Whole Foods, but I’ve always got something there that can make me look busy. Usually I really am busy.

When we first looked at this place, it was summer and our deck was full shade, by the little wooded area behind our building.  We get squirrels, chipmunks, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, black-headed chickadees, and cardinals back there.   Once we even got a Sharp-Shinned hawk, who stared down a squirrel who wasn’t feeling all that threatened by his impressive display of dominance over the sparrows.

But by the time we closed and moved in, it was November, and the trees were starting to lose their leaves.  The building on the other side of the wooded area – the one with an entrance on Comm Ave and a high volume of students living in it – was starting to peek through the trees.  By January all the trees were bare and we had lots of light on our porch.  But come March, the daffodils we were poking through the dirt, and by May all the oak trees were in bloom again, and we had our shade back.

Of course, when we have shade, we can’t get any houseplants to grow on our deck, which is why my beloved started a moss garden.  There’s an upside and a downside to everything.

In Cambridge, there weren’t many Jews around.  It was like being back in San Antonio, Texas.  Midway through Passover, they’d take down their Kosher section.  It’s like someone didn’t send them the memo that the holiday lasted eight days. Seven days, if you’re Reform.  Which reminds me to have patience with the goyim who can’t keep track of our holidays and how long they are. Even we can’t decide.

Here, there are Jews everywhere. The little Russian pharmacy up the street has a mezuzah on their door, and they’re not even religious.  Every Saturday, I see the men in their thick black suits and beards, the women with their wigs and full length dresses.  A brood of children behind them.  It makes me want to be a better Jew, but then I remember no matter what kind of Jew I was, in their eyes, it wouldn’t be good enough.

When we got married, my father quoted As Good As It Gets in his toast. Remember the scene where Jack Nicholson’s character runs into his shrink’s office, in a panic, interrupting someone else’s session, and asks “What if this is as good as it gets?”

Eve Lyons is a poet and fiction writer living in the Boston area. Her work has appeared in Lilith, Literary Mama, Hip Mama, PIF, Welter, Prospectus, Poetry Quarterly, Barbaric Yawp, Word Riot, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, as well as other magazines and several anthologies. Her first book of poetry was published in May of 2020 by WordTech Communications. She works as an expressive arts therapist at an outpatient mental health clinic and teach at Lesley University.