Marking Time

Traces (location)

The tracks appeared overnight. Strips of color in the lawn. Red, orange, and neon yellow. Like iridescent snail tracks.

"He was out here early this morning, waving his wand."

The speaker is my neighbor, Lee.

"I saw him walk past my window, probably about eight-fifteen. Somewhere around there. I was on my second cup of coffee. He wore a yellow vest."

I nodded, like this latest piece of information was all I needed to solve the puzzle.

"What is it for?" Lee asked, scratching his beard.

"It's trouble," I replied. I sighed, "nothing but trouble." I had seen this type of thing before.

Later that morning, I called Vicky. As the HOA manager, she is supposed to know what is going on in the community.

"I don't know," she told me. "Nobody tells me nothing." While not technically true, she hears a lot of good stuff, it was obvious that I had caught her by surprise with this one. "Tell me again what it looks like," she demanded.

"There are painted stripes on our lawns, marking the locations of buried power and telephone cables," I told her. "Somebody paid to have them located. That means someone is going to dig in my yard. And not just mine, the whole neighborhood has been marked."

"If I hear anything, I'll call ya." We hung up, if you can still call it that when using a cellphone.

I saw Bill, my other neighbor, out in his yard. Bill sightings are rare these days while he is recovering from a recent surgery. I grabbed two coke zeros and went out to greet him.

"What's that?" he said, waving his cane at a patch of orange.

"I believe that's paint," I told him.

He gave me a sour look. Bill secretly enjoys my sense of humor but does a masterful job of disguising it. "I know it's paint. Why is it there?"

"It is denoting the location of the AT&T lines," I told him." Somebody is going to dig here "

"That have anything to do with the gas line they are putting through?" BIll wondered.

Obviously, Bill had better sources of information. "Where'd ya hear that?" I asked him.

"At the clubhouse. That for me?" He took the coke. "Suzie dropped me off yesterday. Got tired of me sitting around the house. You remember that guy, Lenny? Knows everybody? Lenny says he was talking to a guy that said the gas company put in too small a feeder line. They put in a two inch line and it should've been at least four. So now pressure is low at the further neighborhoods and they won't have enough capacity for the new areas that are going up. So they gotta ovebuild."

"Or underbuild," I said, looking at the marked yards. "When's this supposed to happen?"

"Well, they better do it before the grass starts growing," Bill said. "Or all this stuff will be gone."

We stood there, two old men, looking at the trail of colorful dashes running through the front yards of the neighborhood like a psychedelic morse code, and I knew our idyllic existence was about to change.