October’s festival was boring, so I left.
It ended outside an old storefront. One I hadn’t set foot in since the festival this time last year, and since the start of a pandemic the time before that. The owner stood casually in the doorway.
First, telling me about his wares. Then about the other locations he was renting, all framed politely near the entrance.
I smiled at him lightly. “This one will always be your favorite.”
He started telling me about the paint. The perfect color.
“I know. My friends and I painted it.”
“Really? What was it before?”
“Some horrid greenish yellow.”
He started telling me about his favorite part, the wall of exposed brick.
“My friends and I exposed that brick, just before our first service. We hid four hundred pounds of gypsum in the courtyard that night.”
He started telling me about the floors. “You see that spot there? Gray tiles? I think there was a cabinet over them or something. I think the whole floor used to look like that.”
“It did. We pulled those tiles up by hand.”
“I’ll tell you this,” he tells me. “It only happens in the fall. At certain times of day. I don’t know what it says, but when the light comes in just right through the front window there, I can see the letters you guys painted on the glass.”
G-d, there were so many years measured in that moment. “I know what it says. It says, Coming Soon. South Philadelphia Shtiebel.”
He looked at me and smiled. “We must have washed those windows a hundred times since then.”
**
You don’t know the mark you leave on this world. What the people say, long after you stop going to the places they say them in. When the leaves are changing and hundreds of strangers are rushing by a storefront window in the rain, who is stopping to look in, and why they linger.
**
And where they went.
**
I find myself thinking a lot about windows. Because they’re made for both directions, right? I can still look in and see the memories of us. Can those memories look out? Can they see the day our paint was chipped off the glass? Do they know how vibrant that community would be some day? Did they smile on the day we left, because while we stared from the street at meticulously labeled boxes, they knew the letters would remain even after all this time, every single autumn when the sun came in?
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