Riverside Drive

"Benny and Blanca own the corner store. They're okay except don't lean on the candy counter." – Cisneros, "House on Mango Street"









Yahara River

We moved to the yellow house so that we could 'live on the river' we were told. We were told that this was a great cut across the isthmus and used to be more zig zag and held catfish the size of teenagers. We can see it from outside the front windows at any time, a little layer of velvet usually flowing into Lake Monona in big waves. Sometimes, if you squint, you can forget about the street out front and it feels like the house itself is floating along the Yahara, it is so close.  It took Corey and I a year to trust it over there, so close, and brand new people walking along the path at the shore of the park. People from all over the city come to the bridge at our intersection to take pictures from the top looking down onto the green water in summer. "Why is it green?" Corey asks to this day. There are days in the summer when dead white fish float down the river all the while kids from the school down the street are jumping off the next bridge down into deep water. "It's green because it has stuff in it from farms, chemicals," we were told. "You don't want to open your mouth if you fall in," dad has said many times, and so when we get on the paddle board we stand there right in the middle of the board, stick straight and solid, not wanting to touch a thing. We chase green headed ducks around the shore line from kayaks. Out in the open water of the lake, fisherman in their thin tin boats nose in from the middle of the lake and anchor. In the winter, when the lake is a giant white and gray mirror, there are fifty huts that dot every side of the lake, sometimes smoke puffing up out of them. We can walk as far as we want to, looking back into our neighborhood, and we see the yellow house there afloat at the corner, shining like the sun.