100 Words: Frame of sticks

Frame of sticks in our building’s front yard that some of the kids erected—a skeletal model of shelter in the lap of our actual shelter, six brick units with six families mixing more or less promiscuously, a pod or lifeboat floating us through the quarantine. I sit in the shade of the boxelder that’s been growing out front as long, maybe, as the building has existed, its sheltering crown making the third floor where I live into a kind of treehouse world. Skies are lowering with a summer rain’s incipience—there is no calm anymore that doesn’t come before the storm.