We go where we want now. I like the houses with front porches the best. Around Seddon they have tables and chairs and hanging pots with lush green leaves or flowers tumbling down the sides. I never see anyone sitting on the seats out the front, but a lot of them have cushions. They look comfortable. And pretty. Often the tables have the chairs arranged like someone was just sitting there but stepped away. Sometimes people come out, usually to get in their car or walk off. Never to sit on those chairs with the nice cushions or put their feet under the tables with the pots on top. All that lovely greenery hanging down and no one sits under it. Sometimes I stand at a gate and stare at it all. I stand with my hand on the latch. Maybe I live there. Maybe those are my cushions.

The backpack’s pretty empty by the end of the day—we’ve eaten the snacks and I carry the water bottle in my free hand. The gates don’t squeak when you open them. The first time I just sat on the seat and looked back down the street. Nobody saw me. Nobody came out. I pick the houses that feel the most loved. The ones that actually do look like people sit there, not the ones like Christmas church Jesus displays that you know are just for show. I stop at a house with a pink front door and a heavy black knocker shaped like an acorn. The table’s dusty when I touch it but the cushions are large and soft, like cushions you’d have inside. Splints doesn’t sit. He stands, claws tapping on the deck as he steps from foot to foot, watching. Making me nervous. I motion for him to sit but he steps back and knocks over a pot. It cracks loudly and rolls in a semicircle, soil spilling over the boards as the plant falls out.

I’ve caught my breath a bit when we find the next house. Its cushions are yellow and pink. Perfectly matched to the pansies growing in the hanging baskets on either side of the porch step. They’re not those oversized ones, these cushions. They’re the size you could fit easily into your bag. Some of the houses have smaller-than-backpack-sized hanging potted plants, others have little garden ornaments. Wire twisted into animals or delicate little birds sitting on the ends of pots. The sorts of things I imagine a family might go and buy at a garden center on the weekend, or maybe they get them as gifts. Some of them are really quite small. The kind of small that easily fits into a side pocket of a backpack.