Cliff Notes for Seasons by Julie Marie Wade
“I’m always trying first to get to the emotional tenor,” Julie Marie Wade comments in an interview for Colorado State’s Center for Literary Publishing, “and usually for me that’s setting.” In her flash-length lyric essay “Cliff Notes for Seasons,” she describes her Florida neighborhood: “a cul-de-sac, where the houses face each other like guests arranged around a table,” occasional glimpses of their tidy lives visible through open garage doors, neighbors interacting as they tend their yards. Was the night when a fire truck and ambulance filled the cul-de-sac with flashing red lights and sirens “a strange, synchronous dream we shared with our fellow diners”? At times the first-person-plural narrative POV seems to encompass all the residents, who view the older woman meticulously maintaining her yard something like the townspeople in William Faulkner’s first-person-plural “A Rose for Emily” view the venerable, mysterious Miss Emily Grierson. At other times, “we” refers to the narrator and her partner, new to this place (“In Florida, we’ve learned, most people use the garage as a spare room”) and perhaps doubly curious as a result. With “today,” the narrative POV shifts to first person and the narrator’s individual memories and insights.
Details accumulate that take on added resonance, for readers and the narrator. The neighbor dresses neatly in “culottes, the pleats carefully pressed, ribbed socks, and Reebok tennis shoes with nary a scuff or scratch.” There’s “not a trace of color” in her hair. Her pink garage is “stark, spotless.” Her yard has no trees, a fact particularly significant to the narrator’s last conversation with her. The first-person narrator notices what she’d “failed to see” and can now see more clearly.
“Cliff Notes” can refer to any outline or guide. In her author’s note, Wade explains that this essay is part of a series called Cliff Notes for Mid-Life, “an intellectual and emotional inventory of what I’ve learned in my first four and a half decades.” The “Cliff Notes,” she says in the Center for Literary Publishing interview, center on “ordinary things that really are metaphors for other things.” Her neighbor’s wardrobe and yard. A “beloved cat” that died on a day the narrator trades greetings with her neighbor. A “regal plumeria” radiant with pink blossoms, the subject of their last face-to-face conversation. A yard filled with leaves. Ordinary things are charged with larger emotional meaning in Wade’s beautifully constructed portrait of a neighbor and lesson on how to live. —CRAFT
We haven’t seen her in weeks, our neighbor with white hair that tufts and spumes, not a trace of color in it, not even a sliver of gray. We never learned her name, but we noticed—the way you notice on a cul-de-sac, where the houses face each other like guests arranged around a table—how she always walked out around midday, in a long tank top and a pair of culottes, the pleats carefully pressed, ribbed socks, and Reebok tennis shoes with nary a scuff or scratch. Bright white on the top, bright white on the bottom, long limbs sun-soaked and golden-tan. She must have been eighty at least. We noticed her walking, her pausing to talk to the neighbors. Sometimes she walked with the woman who drives the Subaru, past the NO OUTLET sign to the sidewalk that curves around the main road. Coming home, I would see her ambling along behind the garden wall, waving a car through the crosswalk so she could continue her unhurried stroll. Year-round walking, year-round backing her sleek black Mercedes down the drive, year-round parking inside her pink garage. In Florida, we’ve learned, most people use the garage as a spare room. We catch glimpses: storage bins, gardening tools, bicycles lined up, all leaning the same way. But her garage was stark, spotless. In the afternoons, we often saw her sweeping blades of blown grass back onto the lawn, the broad door rolling down behind her as she disappeared into the house. One night—it must have been at least two months ago now—a fire truck and ambulance arrived in the cul-de-sac, blaring. They filled all the space, occupied the narrowing mouth of the road. We stood from our desks in that work-at-home way, their hard sound piercing the early night. It was December, and some Christmas trees already glowed behind the neighbors’ curtains, electric candelabra plugged in and perched on their windowsills. So much competing light, so many people opening their doors, and the woman who drives the Subaru running toward the blare. We craned our necks, but we couldn’t see far, couldn’t see more. After dinner, the eerie quiet of routine resumed. No more sirens or flashing lights, not even the heavy churn of engines as the rescuers drove away. Was it all a strange, synchronous dream we shared with our fellow diners? No one mentioned it. The cul-de-sac seemed unchanged. Then, we traveled for the holidays. Then, we were busy with our own pulling in and pulling out of the driveway, busy letting the mowed grass slip between the slats of the closed garage door, busy breaking down boxes and filling new bins. Today I stood watering hibiscus flowers on the front porch while a woman I had never seen before knelt on the neighbor’s lawn. She, too, wore a tank top and culottes with notable pleats. My heart leapt up for a moment, remembering what I had failed to see—had failed to watch for in recent weeks. This woman had yellow hair, dyed bright as a dandelion, short but still tied at the nape of her neck. And a man, who was only middle-aged (our age? I marveled), dipped a sponge into a pail of soapy water and began to scrub the sleek black Mercedes he had backed onto the drive. Her garage door gaped, giving way to the same spotless interior. Suddenly, I remembered the day our beloved cat passed away, carrying him to the car that final time. We always just park on the drive. The woman was walking by and said good morning to me. It was the worst morning, the most unimaginable morning, but I returned her words, and their familiar taste soothed my throat as his body trembled in my arms. Another time, as I was raking leaves scattered by the regal plumeria—so prolific her daily discards!—the woman was walking by again. She stopped at the edge of our lawn and exclaimed, “I’m so glad to see you’re finally doing something about that tree!” Arms full of leaves, I turned to meet her eyes—the one time we saw each other face to face. “What do you mean?” I asked. I wanted the woman to be sweet. I wanted the woman to love the tree the way we love the tree, its effulgent pink blossoms bursting forth year-round. “I’ve been petitioning the Homeowners’ Association to tear it out for years—chop it down—whatever’s easiest.” She shook her head. “Such a mess it makes everywhere.” My mouth agape, my arms still brimming with leaves, I didn’t reply. Today I noticed the absence of trees in her yard, the absence of shade, the bald walls and bare sills, no visible drapes or blinds. Then, as our eyes met, I waved to the man washing her car, to the woman plucking (I could see clearly now) tiny buds of purple clover from her grass. I might have said something to them. I might have asked. Why didn’t I? Our lawn is covered with leaves again, and I left them. Leave the leaves, I murmured, stepping inside, as if their name carried their single, dying wish.
JULIE MARIE WADE writes and publishes poetry, prose, and hybrid forms. Her most recent and forthcoming collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, Fisk, By Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home in Hollywood with Angie Griffin and their two cats. In September 2025, University Press of Florida will publish her new memoir, Other People’s Mothers. Find Wade on Instagram @JulieMarieWade.
Featured Image by Colin Watts, courtesy of Unsplash.
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