103/365 Swimsuit, Really?

She was freezing. It's like 70 degrees and the sun's going down. But she wanted the swimsuit.

102/365 raised bed right before filling

I don't have a photo of it filled. Once filled, you don't see the trash rock almost at all. And the hostas planted in it will cover the rest. I'm very happy with it.

101/365 Purse Snatching

The phone rang. It was Bobbie from across the street. She said she had to get Nate to school, but that the woman who lived next door--in the Friedmans house--had her purse stolen right in front of the house just then.

I put down the breakfast dishes and rushed to the front of the house. The police were there, taking her statement. Bobbie went on:

"Yeah, she was walking to her car and this guy walked up the sidewalk, grabbed her purse, and ran down the street. She started going after him, too, and Kyle called to her not to, I mean, really."

I get off the phone and think about complacency. We've gotten sleepy between the sycamores. It's been 4 years since any crime worth calling the police about has happened. That one was a doozy--an assault on a neighbor and Jake during the National Night Out Against Crime block party (yes, we do irony here, no extra charge). I watched the cop get in his car and drive away. She went back into the house.

I felt bad. I didn't even know her name--and I know EVERYONE'S name around here. I grabbed one of my little MOO cards, you know, those half-sized business cards, and walked across the street. She was on her phone on the porch. She took the card.

"Email me," I told her. "I'll get you on the block list and stuff."

"Thank you," she mouthed back to me. I ran back across the street to get girls to school.

It's been more than a few days. No word from her--but also not much sign of her. I need to try again.

100/365 Little bit in the middle

Daisy makes the big girls crazy. Bree, Eliza, Iris, and Fiona get together in groups of two or three usually, and oftentimes I let Maeve go with.

Oftentimes it doesn't go well.

If they play outside, there's a chance. Playgrounds, sidewalks, pools, walks to the park--those have a better success rate. But inside Eliza's house? She wanders downstairs to chat with Gretchen and Nick, use the bathroom, sing...and then go back upstairs and wreak havoc with whatever the older girls have started. I figure similar things happen at Bree's house. She's 5 (almost 6). The older girls are 9 and 10. It's just too big a difference still.

But I always offer to call Joy and see if Bonnie Dee can play and this is often met with "BUT I WANT TO PLAY WITH THE BIG GIRLS!" It's hard to be little and it's hard to be in the middle. Things could be going better for Daisy, over all. School is kicking her rear, she's not on the top of the heap socially at school any longer, Leo is taking time away from me and Jake, and Fiona has all sorts of privileges she just can't have yet.

Bonnie Dee is in the same boat: two older brothers and a younger brother and just started kindergarten. I need to guide her in that direction more. They could kvetch about their dang families and what a mess everything is.

99/365 Raised Bed II

So I worked on it through the afternoon. I'm 3/4 the way done with the walls, which are dry stone/stacked wall, but secretly held together with liquid nail of some kind. This is what I did in the front next to my stoop, the tiny strip of land between my steps and the neighbor's gangway steps.

I've used up all the waste rock from the cairn, and that area all cleared out is making me incredibly happy. This week, after it rains tomorrow, I will finish this, line it, and fill it with dirt. The hostas will go back home and be happy.

98/365 Raised Bed

It's time for a couple of raised beds in my backyard. My porch is two-tiered. The lower porch is about two feet off the ground and two feet from the western fence, as seen here. I love my backyard with this porch added on. But there are some logistical issues. To begin with, the gap between the porch and the western fence has some lovely large leafed hostas growing in it, but you can't see them because the porch is too tall. And back, behind where this photo can see, is a water spigot on the back wall of the house. That's not a problem, but it means it's a place I need to get to pretty regularly (pool, sprinklers, the watering system in the back garden is a drip hose). And it's awful. There's a huge pile of busted up concrete and this ugly holey rock that we took out of the yard when we moved in. It's a cairn. It's 3 feet high. And the concrete path is covered in vines and debris. It's depressing to walk into the house by the back door and glance down to that sight.

So I'm doing a few things. I'm building a raised bed the length of the porch, with a gap between it and the western fence to store that danged ladder in. And I'm building it out of all that waste rock, since it's a spot where you won't see the walls of the raised bed anyway. And once that rock is out of the way of the spigot, I'm spreading a sand base over the mess of cracked concrete and waste dirt and laying some concrete pavers. Something I can SWEEP. Something that will stay neat.

97/365 Storm coming in

Mah jongg winds down quickly. We all look tired--a few of us are teachers getting back into the swing of things, almost all of us have kids doing the same thing. We play 3 or 4 hands. I win one. Since Gretchen wasn't there, we didn't have to play until she won at least one hand. Some nights she demands two.

It's my set and I offer to leave it, but really, there are only a few women who play there that night--me, Zelda, Cicely, Jackie. Jen knows how to play but nearly always declines in exchange for conversation. And there are two newcomers--Wendy, and Brenda's new tenant, whose name I've forgotten. I half-heartedly attempted to teach, but my will was weak. I wanted to play a bit and go home and sleep.

"I want to get home before that storm comes in," Jackie said as I made my excuses. So we cleaned up the set--you can play with 3 but you can't with just two. We said our goodbyes and headed across the street, down the street, next door, over there. Lightning flashed, illuminating the dark corners by our porches and next to our cars.

The door's unlocked and I tell Zelda goodnight. Jake's still upstairs on the computer, watching something on netflix. I join him. The storm comes in.

96/365 September Mah Jongg Conversation

"How many cats do you have?" Wendy asks as I cut myself a piece of Cicely's pumpkin pie.

"Three. It's a good number for us."

"Yeah, we're down to three, too, and I don't know if I'll get a fourth to replace my old one that died this summer."

We walk back into the main room where the mah jongg set is, sitting down at our places.

"I think that we'll keep three," I continue. "When we lose one, we'll just get another."

"What?" asks Jen. "Kids?"

I almost, but not quite, snort white wine through my nose.

95/365 Balloons Glow

94/365 Picnic with Neighbors

I'm not sure why Gretchen spent the whole picnic with her back to me, but it had more to do with fried chicken than snubbing. Fiona ate some of our food, but not really; the Paxtons had better fare. Someone always has better fare.

But no one had cuter fare.

93/365 We biked there

The Forest Park Balloon Glow. Every mid-September, the Friday night before the race. Used to be, you could drive over sometime in the evening, park, walk about a quarter mile or so, and enjoy the balloon glow. It was almost my first date with Jake back in college, but not quite (we had a tagalong). Nowadays, you have to get there two hours before rush hour and wait, or take the metrolink and walk, or park and walk 2 miles or more. Plus fight the traffic insanity.We biked this year. We drove to the park, left our car in the opposite corner of the balloon glow, and biked over. It was perfect. We got some exercise, we hauled all the stuff we wanted in the trailer, the kids didn't whine.

92/365 He is Posing

She is not:

91/365 Afternoon on a Hill

Apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay

90/365 Our Folk in a Nutshell

It was a backyard block party. Daisy was attempting to join in some version of "kill the man with the ball" being played by Noah and Reggie, Mitch and Auggie and some of the older girls. She was failing, of course, being small and short-tempered. Beer in hand, Justin scoops her up with the ball and keeps her away from her would-be assassins.

89/365 Update on Ida's House

Sometimes karma's a bitch.

Or not. I don't know the whole story. But oftentimes that makes for a better story than the whole story. Look at history.

To recap: Ida sold her house. She listed with Kristina and Mark Walsh, who cheated her (well, not technically, but from my perspective) out of what she deserved by flipping it to a friend who flipped it to a developer. Ida exits stage left. And then Kristina and Mark exit stage right, well, stage south, as they move a few blocks away and dump their dump of a house on the Friedmans.

I wrote about Ida's house a few days ago, and THAT DAY my mother called me and mentioned that my father had been talking to the guy who lives next door to them and HE said....

Kristina and Mark's house was foreclosed on and is bank-owned.

Well, the guy who lives next door to my parents has a lot of things to say (I guess he's like me) and so I took it with the proverbial grain of salt and put it in the back of my mind.

Then I went for a walk down to the coffee shop, passing their house on the way. Sure enough, there's the sign. Bank owned. Coming soon onto the market. No curtains in the windows, no lights on inside. Papers tacked to the front door.

It's hard not to set my jaw and say good riddance. Just like the doula taught me when I was in labor the second time, draw my jaw down, relax those facial muscles, and breathe. I walked on past and thought not a single negative thing. Because it's too bad, really, and a foreclosed house anywhere is just another sign of the times we're finding ourselves in. And who wants more reminders of that? It's a hole in a neighborhood and lives that have to be rebuilt. And even if I'm not a big fan of the lives needing rebuilding (assuming, of course, that they don't see this as some kind of perverse positive), I can't wish that sort of luck on anyone.

Still, it did make me shake my head.

88/365 Stoop Sitters

Noah and Eliza; you can't see Bree and Fiona sitting on the steps (those are Fiona's legs, though). Back from the bike riding evening, with spare moments, they sit and chat. They used to run and play on the swingset or make up elaborate polly pocket scenarios.

But before I get all wistful: they still do that, too. But that night they started a homework club. And I say hear, hear!

87/365 Bike Ride Before the Rain

It was going to rain. Pretty durned obvious. I called Jake to see when he'd be home and he said normal time for the downtown client--a bit before 5. I knew if we waited until he got home, we'd never get away in time to make it to Forest Park, bike the loop, and get back into the car before the rain. So I prepared without him. I filled camelbaks and gathered helmets. I got bikes down from hooks in the front hall. Took the trailer and the trail-a-bike out to the car. Fit everything in and got Sophia's clunky old mountain bike (a freebie; she deserves better, perhaps for her next birthday) on top of the car.

Then I attempted to get my Motobecane mixte into that center bike rack.

That was stupid. So stupid my gynecologist, while, well, doing his job, asked me, "how'd you get that bruise there? And it's match over here?" Any woman who's been to the doctor knows what this means: is your husband beating you? I explained my sorry attempt to get my bike on top of the car.

"Ugh, I remember back when the kids were little trying to get that done--shouldn't that be Jake's job, though?"

"Yeah," I admit. "It should. We were trying to beat the rain..."

Jake got home and fixed it. We made it to the park and biked the loop in good time. Made it home before the rain, even, and Jake took the bikes off the car for me.

86/365 Quick Bike Ride Before the Rain

85/365 Adios Galvan

The horse trough pool is gone. Tomorrow is bulk trash day (once a month we can put something too large to throw away in the dumpsters out in the alley--most of the time it's picked up before the city comes to pick it up, by junkmen of all sorts). Jake and I rolled the behemoth out into the alley and leaned it against the old mulberry stump. I hope it's not too big, because otherwise I don't know what we'll do. I guess cut it into pieces and stack it? Misery.

It served us well, though. We got it when Sophia was 3, so that was 6 years of fun in the backyard. Next year its replacement is new-fangled and has a built in filter, so we will have a better chance of keeping it clean for longer. Maybe even a summer. It will fit in the same spot but go to the basement for the off-season, leaving the space for a fire pit and a gravel patio. I'm so excited to graduate to a less hoosier yard. It was fun while it lasted but there comes a time when even I have to admit that new, clean, and efficient is a nice break from old, grungy, time-consuming, and potentially dangerous to the point of requiring tetanus shots.

All the girls cared about was depth: was the new pool as deep, or deeper? In fact, slightly deeper. Same diameter. And so they were happy.

And so the galvanized pool goes the way of the cast off college furniture and our old furnace. I have a hard time letting go of things that are still useful (and therefore we own a clawfoot tub in our basement, and a pedastal sink, and a room's worth of marble tile, and and and), but along with the tattered college furniture and the furnace, the pool gave its all. Adios.

84/365 Monopoly

She won. Fair and square, she beat us at Monopoly. Younger sister tagalong got 2 hours of equal attention and the sweet taste of victory.

83/365 Ida's House

Ida was moving. A little house in Holly Hills, moving in with her sister. Getting out of the 3-story monstrosity she'd benevolently neglected the last 20 years. She needed to sell.

Enter, stage left: Kristina and Mark Walsh, her former next door neighbors. Mark was on his second marriage to much younger Kristina, with a daughter from a previous marriage and a new wife who wasn't going to dilly dally around with any kids. They had both already decided their first attempts at making money in St. Louis weren't going to work, and so they took on the real estate business. Bought a house three blocks south and began to rehab it, all the while neglecting the shell of a house they were currently occupying. Helen's old place that she shed for a condo in the county. They got it for a song and constantly talked about how much they loved the neighborhood, loved our block, loved the kids, loved the trees. The moment the house three blocks south was completed, they dumped this one on the Friedmans for far more than what it was worth and high-tailed it to the good life on a cul-de-sac. They'd run into us and tell us how much they hated what the Friedmans were doing to "their" house, how much they missed the atmosphere and camaraderie of our block. We would do a lot of smiling and nodding.

You see where this is going.

They listed Ida's house. It sold in 3 days. It sold to a friend of Kristina's. Friend of Kristina's sold it for 3 times the sale price to a developer. I don't know if Ida knew about that second sale. But from then on, Kristina was greeted with thin lipped smiles and conversations cut short. I didn't know Ida well, but you shit where you sleep and you have to find a new bed. I don't know, maybe she thought we wouldn't learn about it. That we wouldn't care. That we'd see it was just business. But that's not how I saw it.

The developer did quick work--we have a term here, a Bosnian rehab, based on the often shoddy and bizarre house rehab work done by Bosnian construction companies on the south side. The developer was Bosnian, but in the end, it was the exception. Not perfection, not pinnacle of historic accuracy meets modern convenience, but it was ok. Bobbie and Kyle moved in with their son Nate and they're good neighbors. All is well. But before the job was all the way finished and sold, Bruce Friedman came over to my house with a spade.

"You know how to dig up rose bushes?" he asked.

I demurred. But he explained: Ida had called him. She'd moved at the wrong time of year to take her roses with her, but thought maybe he could get them for her, since the house was being rehabbed, maybe nobody would care? Bruce talked to the developer, who in fact did not care. The rose bushes went home with Ida. She was frail and elderly and had her rose bushes at her sister's house in a sleepier neighborhood. I hope she's still well.

Kristina and Mark still own the house three blocks away, but it has a rotating for sale sign now--up for a few months, down for a few months. At this point in the market, I'm sure they're underwater and quite unhappy. But that's business.

82/365 The Men Next Door

"The two next door, you know, are a gay couple," Mildred tells me. It's the last thing she says to me before we leave with our real estate agent. "But they're good neighbors. Could eat off the the bricks in their patio." She leans on her cane and sighs. Her whole life is in this house and it will take us 10 years at least to shrug the weight off. Jake and I leave with our agent, planning our move. I don't think anything about what she said until after we've bought the place and moved in, shoveling out decades of crap from the basement and peeling wallpaper from Satan's drawing room off the dining room walls.

I hear them in their yard, though, sometime in June. A head pokes over the wood fence. "Hi," he says. "I'm Ruben."

I introduce myself. He welcomes me to the neighborhood. Offers me hostas once I get my yard together (which of course never happened--the getting it together, I mean). Later that day, Jake and I are sitting on our front porch, thinking about what we've done, and there's the other neighbor. He stands in his front yard and doesn't approach.

"Hello, you must be Bridgett and Jake," he says, not moving.

We agree. "Ruben told me about you. I'm Scott. We keep our porchlights on at night, maybe Mildred didn't mention it."

"Ok," I nod. "That sounds like a good idea."

"For safety." He walks away. "Good luck with the house."

It'll be a long time before I'm drinking really good wine offered to me by a rented butler, standing in their living room at a Christmas party where I'm the only woman in the room, laughing and laughing at Ruben's Barbra Streisand collection. Jake and I had a long way to go to prove ourselves. And Ruben and Scott and a long way to go to figure out that we were there for the long haul.

81/365 The Oberneufermanns

They're two doors up. This is the conversation, almost verbatim, from when I met Hazel 11 summers ago:

Hazel: Oh it's too bad about Mildred [the woman we bought the house from]. She was a sweetheart but she never, you know, had control over that brother of hers, and his son? I think there was something wrong with him. In the yard, shooting things. Nothing ever grew there, you know.

Me: do you know many other neighbors?

Hazel: Well, most of them are renters up our way, and we don't interact much anymore. Henry and Viv, of course, have been around forever, and Len and Jackie. Helen across the street, but she doesn't get out much anymore. Mostly just her son and his vans, you know. Smelling like gasoline. Tsk. The men next door to you, of course, we haven't met. No sir. I did notice a moving van up the way at the old Yearson place. It's haunted, you know. Nobody stays there long. One night a few years back, the people living there, they'd just moved in, just bought the place, and in the middle of the night they started tossing stuff out onto the lawn from the second story windows! Just tossed it out and drove off in a panic. Came back the next day and got the stuff but never came back to live. Then it was for sale a long time, of course, but now somebody new's bought it, I see. I wonder how long they'll last.

Me: I love ghost stories like that.

Helen: Well, I'm sure there's a good one up there!

Me: So it's just you and your husband in your house now?

Helen: Gilbert and I just finished rehabbing the upstairs, but now we're moving downstairs to the other apartment, I guess we'll work on it. My daughter's moving home. She's pregnant, and the man she's married to didn't want kids after all. Walked out on her. We pray, but I just don't know. So she'll be upstairs with the baby and we'll see how that goes. I hope he comes around, but.

Me: Maybe he will. Maybe once he meets the baby he will.

Helen: Maybe. Say, you know who bought the house here between us? Dwayne Farthing.

Me: I don't know him, I haven't met him. I thought the postman lived here?

Helen: No, he sold out and retired. Sold to Dwayne Farthing. I guess we'll be building a fence. It's good to meet you, Bridgett. Glad you have a dog.

80/365 Not the Best First Impression

I'm packing the car Friday after school. We're heading down to Jake's parents' house for a weekend to work on his aunt and uncle's house building efforts. The car is only so big, though, and both girls have misquoted me, with teary effects.

"But you said we could bring ALL our waldorf dolls," Fiona says, way too emotional for the situation. She's referring to these soft bodied handmade dolls they've gotten for Christmas each year since they were small. They each have 6 or so, including a "heavy baby" which is in fact a heavy baby, in a bunting stuffed with rice or walnut shells or something like that. Lug.

"I know I told you that," I admit, "but I didn't know it would mean all their gear as well." Daisy is standing on the porch clutching a doll stroller in one hand and a backpack full of stuff in the other.

Jake is saying no. Flat no. Put that stuff inside no. Billy is crying while Jake brings tools and boots down to the car. I'm good enough at packing, though, that everything fits without a problem.

"Actually, they can bring the dolls and blankets and a pillow each," I concede. "But none of that hard gear, the strollers and shit."

The girls overhear and start dividing stuff up. The stroller goes back inside but they trot out reasonably happy and get themselves situated in the car. Now I've been packing the car for 10 minutes and a headache is forming over my right eye. I close the hatchback, press Billy into his carseat against his wails of protest, and look across the street.

There, in the Friedmans' house, is their tenant, a young woman, Bruce told me, with a new job in town but nowhere to go and no way to pay a first month's rent. A young lawyer, I think he told me. She's sitting in one of his porch chairs. Just watching us.

"Did you go over and meet the new neighbor?" Jake asks as we pull away from the curb. I look at him with that are you kidding me look that I've been perfecting over 15 years.

"I just don't think we were making the best first impression."

79/365 Quiet Block

The kids were in bed. Jake and I were exhausted from our long weekend at his parents' house. We were about to veg in front of the computer, where we watch movies and TV from Netflix and he turned to me.

"You're going to go run an errand, right?" he asked. He meant Ted Drewes, the frozen custard stand in south city.

"I think I probably was going to, yes," I agree. He gives me his order and I head out to retrieve utter naughtiness.

I get home with my brown paper bag, dry ice included to keep things cold. Travis and Zelda are on their porch and I say hello.

"Was it quiet here this weekend?"

"Yeah," Zelda affirms, looking up and down. "Besides Dawn and Judd," she points, "Len was here, Mason and Cicely, maybe that was it?"

"Poor Bree," I sympathize. When everyone leaves town but us, Fiona gets lonely.

"Oh, she was fine. We were so busy she didn't have time to notice."

I fill them in on our weekend house-building, and then head in. My butterscotch chocolate-chip concrete awaits.

78/365 Goodbye to Summer (Again?)

It's been a long summer, and a long goodbye to summer. I had hot coffee this morning. The year has turned.

77/365 Join the Club

The bar, you know, you put across your steering wheel in your car to make it less likely that some joy riding teenager will steal your car and crash it six blocks away.

I've never managed to be bothered enough to get one. I should, I know. I should run out today and get one and put it on my car. And unlike, say, bars on my windows and armed security guards to escort my children to school, a club does not have a negative effect on my quality of life. It doesn't block the view or make me feel like a prisoner in my own home. It might make my car feel less unguarded and naked sitting out there on the street all night.

Maybe in the spring when crime picks up again. Maybe.

76/365 My steps

I had to run out to the car a few nights ago to retrieve something I'd left out there. Probably a bag from Target. I was barefoot and carefully made my way down my steps--my grandmother called them Mississippi concrete, but I'm not sure where that term comes from. They are rough underfoot, set with gravel and cement. The top step of the stoop is caving out from the underside, due to root migration and erosion over 100 years. I know we'll have to patch it come next spring, with some ill-matching cement patch Jake finds at the hardware store. And the patch will catch my eye and irritate me for years until I start to forget the jagged edge and see the patch as just another part of the steps.

A few weeds try to grow in the crack between the second and third steps, but this is a place where I sit to watch kids run up and down the sidewalk, and then pulling weeds is an idle hobby, not a chore. They never last long.

These are my steps. This is the bridge between my private life and my public face. This is where I greet the delivery man and the guy asking for money for the bus. I stand here in my bare feet, almost always in my bare feet, and feel the clammy concrete feel my presence.

75/365 Garden in its sagging beauty

It is September. The cucumbers are pulled up and the tomatoes are flaunting their fruitlessness. The butterfly bush is ragged looking. The phlox is too. Bulbs are done for the year and the trees are getting just a kiss of color. But this little potted plant I stuck in the ground to hide the downspout pipe is still giving all its summer glory as I walk past it on my way to and from my house.

74/365 Fleur de lis

St. Louis is coated in this symbol, the fleur de lis. It's been popular throughout our architectural history, and therefore, my own history as well. My grandparents' door knocker was a fleur de lis. The university I graduated from has a fleur de lis as its symbol. It is on our houses: this is across the street from me. It hides in my house, in every room with a wall air vent, the cover to the vent has one imprinted on it. It is literally everywhere. And it's so odd to visit other cities and it is completely absent--and yet here, it's just subtly present. Nothing overt.