Under Construction

The bump at the end of my road is gone.

Instead fresh soft tar stripes the worn road.

The new neighbors, with their freshly painted shutters,

rejoiced – no more scraping cars or spilled coffee.

None of them realized their new home with blue shutters

would always be “Mr. Stanley's house,"

the man who never refused to buy a box of cookies

even though we all knew he didn't like sweets.

But these neighbors, unpacking vans of throw pillows,

as I graduated from fourth, then sixth, then ninth grade,

didn't know that the same bump which jostled their mugs

and disrupted their conference calls on their daily commute,

was the glorious finish of bike races

the boundary line of exploration

the distance of hyperbolic braggarts:

I can make the shot all the way from there!

They couldn't know how that bump

made me bang my head off the window

waking me after too long car rides

and letting me know I'd soon be home.

They didn't understand how it

scraped my friend's green bug

every time she picked me up for

late night movies, bonfires, or ice-cream runs.

As the families lobbied the town

to fix that god-awful bump in the road,

crying “it's been there for years!”

No one knew “forever” would be more accurate.

To them, it was just a nuisance, a bother, an imperfection.

But that bump was my childhood.