Mullein, and: Safe

Mullein

I live in a 1909 Sears two-story with patinaed wood floors that turn the shade of expensive honey in morning light. I bought this house from my modest salary at an arts nonprofit after I divorced, because it was close to my job and my son’s school. Built on a limestone foundation over deep wells of vinyl chloride–contaminated ground-water, a heavy robin’s-egg-blue wedge atop sandy soil. After moving in, I planted a rain garden. My front yard a tangle of milkweed, woodland strawberry, great blue lobelia, rose turtlehead, honeysuckle, Jacob’s ladder, prairie smoke, and wild golden glow, denser every year.

“The mullein is back,” Sigrun says. We are drinking wine on her front porch, her dog splayed and running in sleep between our two laps. My friend and neighbor, who has noticed more of it this past summer, hairy biennial whose stalks are skirted with a large rosette of sage-green leaves, lining her backyard fence line. She says mullein grows crooked when the soil is contaminated. It’s from her, tonight, that I learn the playground at the end of her block sharing soil with Shoreham Yards, owned by Canadian Pacific, is probably polluted too. When CP greenlit the train-car-themed playground, where we took our sons when they were small, story goes, they made it a contingency that the neighborhood committee who built the park not test the soil for toxins.

Safe

From the Eastside Shoreham Newsletter I learn the name Louise. Louise works for Canadian Pacific. I call, leave a vague message, and am surprised when she calls me back. We talk for a while, I ask my questions. I tell her I want to see it. “What it?” “The roundhouse,” I say. “It was demolished earlier this summer,” she tells me. “Even if it was still standing, you couldn’t see it. This is an active worksite.” I am nodding my head in agreement, though Louise cannot see this. I know about active worksites; I want Louise to know I know. “We don’t just let people onto the railyards. You can’t come in here unless you have business,” Louise says. Do I have business? I breathe the railyard; I eat it in the tomatoes I grow out back. I tell her quite impotently that I receive the Eastside Shoreham Newsletter. I am a regular reader of it. That I didn’t know about any of this until I moved into the neighborhood, just two blocks away from the roundhouse. I tell Louise my address. Her voice shifts. A wall is erected. She says, “People know about the pollution here, the public has been informed.” I concur. I do feel more informed, daily. She tells me there used to be community meetings on the cleanup status, but attendance dwindled so the company stopped hosting them. Then she tells me I am safe. My tap water is safe. My yard is safe. They have been remediating volatile organic compounds since the nineteen eighties. I am so safe. I like the way Louise says the word. She sounds authoritative and maternal. I want to keep her on the phone. I want her to keep telling me.