"Are you going to..."
"I haven't decided," I said. And that was the truth. It still is.
She stood there a moment longer. Then she looked past me, up at my roof, at the forty dark blue panels catching the last of the afternoon, as if she were seeing them for the first time.
"They're not ugly," she said, finally. "I always said they were ugly."
"They're Driftwood Gray-adjacent," I said, and she let out a sound that was very nearly a laugh, and went home.
Lamont is president now, on an interim basis, though he swears he'll hand it off the minute anybody else raises a hand. Last week he asked me, very formally, at the mailbox, whether I might be willing to advise the board on putting solar and a battery system on the clubhouse. Not to save money, he said, though it would. So the next time the feeder goes down in a storm, the people on this street have somewhere cool to go, somewhere to keep insulin cold and charge a phone and sit with a baby in front of a fan. Somewhere besides my garage.
I told him I'd think about it. I've drawn up three versions already, on graph paper, at the kitchen table, after Splice goes to sleep.
This evening I mowed the front yard for the first time since September. The mower charged at noon, off the roof, eleven hundred watts for two and a half hours, the same as always. I mowed slow, in long straight lines, the way my father mowed, and when I was done I parked it under the west eave and plugged it in and stood there in the blue dusk.
Up and down Larkspur Bend, the porch lights came on, one by one, the way they do every night, on wires that run underground to the transformer across the street, and from there to a feeder, and a substation, and a grid that most nights, if we're lucky, holds. Somewhere out there tonight, somebody I trained is on call. I hope it's quiet for them.
My own porch light came on with the rest. It always does. It isn't connected to any of theirs.
But I like to think it keeps them company.