The school across the street from us has been busily preparing for reopening.

(That is a story for another time…..)

Landscape crews have been out in full force. Mowing grass, trimming trees, planting flowers, arranging fresh mulch.

And…..building a wall.

We noticed something was different the other night but couldn’t quite put our finger on it. It finally came down to “Has that wall always been there?” A moment that had us both scrambling to remember and questioning our sanity.

No. The wall was definitely new.

We live on the backside, the storage side, the “business side,” of the school.

The side with the service entrance.
The air handler. The side the maintenance equipment is stored on.

I realize that what caught my attention initially, the thing I couldn’t quite place as being different, wasn’t the new wall, but the fact that things looked neater and tidier than they had before.

The entrance, the air handler, the maintenance equipment, are all right where they have always been. Only now they are hidden from view by the new brick wall.

I feel there is a lesson to be found in this tucking away, this hiding from view, this put together facade that hides the nuts and bolts operation of things; the little man behind the curtain, on the unmulched back side.

It is a reminder that all is not how it seems sometimes. That the people, the houses, the lives we envy; the schools promising “normalcy,” are often chaos hiding behind carefully constructed illusions, pointing our eye to the roses instead of the compost pile.