285. It's a sign

We no longer live between the sycamores. The forestry department came out on Monday. The sycamore closest to Grand was dying and obviously on some sort of to-do list. The street was filled with orange trucks and tree-grabbers and mulchers and all that. Busy morning with the end of the street blocked and it's gone.

When we moved in, there were two sycamores down by Grand, one in the middle of the street, and one at the top corner. All the corner ones are gone now, leaving just this ancient tree in the center of the street, the tallest oldest tree on the block. Its days are numbered and I fear it will be replaced by some bozo tree like a bradford pear or flowering plum or something else ridiculous. We don't have wires in the front of our houses. We should have substantial trees. I know they are a risk in the ice storms and spring thunderstorms we get in the midwest, but they're worth it.

My house is now the most shaded on the north side of the block, with our black oak and sweetgum. They're both younger and healthier than the sycamores, but who knows? Neighbors to the east of us lost 3 American Basswoods in one year. How long until we're debating between zelkovas and oaks?

But I take this as a sign. I haven't been over here much in the past 6 months and it's time to integrate this into South City Musings. I use the same pseudonyms anyway. Gretchen and Zelda and Valerie live over there, too. So there you go. Because it's not going anywhere.

284. Halloween

In St. Louis, the tradition is that if you want candy, you need to have a joke or a song or a talent. You earn candy here. Here were a few of the jokes my children told this year:

Do you want to hear my construction joke?
You can't--it's not finished yet.

Why do witches fly on brooms?
Because vacuum cleaners are too heavy.

How does Darth Vader know what you're getting for Christmas?
He can feel your presents.

Billy? He was a train engineer. Can't you tell?? He had a whistle that sounded like a steam train whistle, and that was his talent. And costume.

Daisy was Lucy from the Narnia series. Hence the schoolgirl outfit combined with the big fur coat/robe thingy. And Fiona went as Galadriel from the Lord of the Rings. She tends to be literary; this was Daisy's first venture past cat/witch/cowgirl standards.

283. International Festival

The view from the inside. Well, from the just outside the inside.

Sunday afternoon, after Melinda left with new knowledge about canning, I walked over to Zelda's house. She keeps sitting on her front porch reading a book and I keep interrupting her to chat. And chat we did. One question I need to ponder more: what makes converts tick? I mean, why do people convert, how do they make the switch in their brains? In their hearts? We weren't talking about subtle interdenominational conversions like Methodist to Catholic to Lutheran to non-denominational Christian. We were talking about major moves. Shifting without the clutch engaged.

But that's for later because I don't have it formulated in my head yet even.

We sat on her porch and watched the sightseers. Our park has several festivals throughout the summer. I call it the park of outcasts--the pagans have a festival, the gay pride fest is there, and then the international festival. Religious fringe, gays, immigrants. And I love that I live here and these things happen. I love that people come to our park and celebrate. People from all around come into the city and spend time (and money) enjoying themselves. It is lovely.

But we wish they would learn how to parallel park.

The international festival is, I would guess based on the parking situation, the biggest of the three summer gatherings. Of course Pridefest is skewed for me because my street gets blocked off for the parade and therefore no one can park on it until after the parade (and frankly, everyone is already here by then). But this weekend made parking tricky.

To begin with, a neighbor who lives near the corner is dying. The family has never been a part of the social life of our block. They've lived here a long time and know Henry and Liv, and Len, but unlike those folks, they never really responded to overtures to join us at barbecues and block parties. That's fine. People have lives centered where they need them to be. But anyway, she's dying and relatives have come in to be there. Be here.

Secondly, Henry and Liv, who are probably in their mid-70s, have eleventy-billion descendants. I think half of them spend the night any given weekend, and then there's a son or a grandson who is living there full-time. He has at least two cars. So we already were a bit crowded.

And then you take folks looking for the absolutely closest space to the park festivities and have them troll up and down our block (we have a one-way street, so this involves illegal wrong way driving, or sometimes just reversing all the way up to the top again) and it's really quite entertaining. People double park. Someone tries to figure out where Big Ed lives because obviously they know him from something, hoping they can park in his garage (where he is parked, of course, because there's nowhere to park on the street).

A woman in an SUV trying to park in a spot that maybe Jake's little Saturn could fit in--and having her teenaged daughter get out to try to guide her in. She eventually gave up. My thought? You're going to walk all over the park. What's three more blocks? Henry and his grandson/son agreed with that and spent the day orchestrating the parking situation, spreading cars out so no one could park, somehow parking a motorcycle so inconveniently that it took up 2 spaces.

I parked in back. Zelda later moved her car to the garage and I took her spot so Jake could park in back post-camping.

We never actually made it over to the festival this year. Fiona wasn't dancing (she was camping) and it was nice to simply stay home. Plus there was the show right outside.

282. My Church

We sat talking on Travis and Zelda's porch. They even went in for a while and said good night to their kids before joining me and Gretchen again outside on the concrete steps. They even offered us wine, but neither of us was interested tonight.

Gretchen was going through a plot of a movie she'd seen and why it was important to her, but kept making me laugh because she referred to the characters by their actors' names and all I could imagine were those people having conversations and doing things, but not in character.

We were talking about schools and churches. Besides our families and our places of work, we all have these two major influences in our lives. Bree just started at St. Fidelis, which seems to be going well. Eliza is still at the same place, and Fiona and Daisy, of course, are at Oak Grove, one in a new classroom and one in the same (they are multi-aged rooms). Gretchen and I asked how Bree was doing, and Zelda described her reaction to their first mass. Fidelis is Catholic; the family is not. But Fidelis is probably the best Catholic school in the city to attend if you aren't Catholic, frankly. No matter what that one nutty girl scout mom said to me. But that wasn't tonight. And Zelda already knows all about her from our talk in person.

Churches is always a topic I like to discuss with these two families because we really are the most alike philosophically but we are not the same denominations. The other Catholics on the block, while definitely my friends, are not as close as these two families. As my pastor has said to me in the past, Catholic is a big tent. Gretchen's friend says it's like being American. You move to Canada, you're still American. You get annoyed at the president, you're still American. You hate the politics or the opinions of the senators, but you're still American. Yes, people leave the Catholic church all the time. But when non-Catholics ask me why I stay, this comes closest to explaining it for me. I'm Catholic. It's what fits me best. It's what I am. Here I am.

Gretchen started talking a bit about her church. Zelda had a couple of things to say about theirs. Mine is an episcopal hierarchy. Zelda's is completely congregational. Gretchen's seems to have the worst of both those worlds, frankly. We talked about youth groups. We talked about service/mass times. We just chatted.

And Gretchen said that she was talking with Nick about church in general, and that the conversation ended thus: "Our church, Nick? Our church is this block."

Gretchen's been saying a lot of true things of late. And this was one of them. We all belong to different parishes and different denominations but if St. Paul were still writing letters, there might be one addressed to between the sycamores. We do what churches do. We take care of older people and youngest people. We make meals when you're sick or just had a baby or somebody died. We have discussions about faith and our place in the world and how we live it out. Nobody puts the bible down on the table and opens to chapter and verse, but Zelda sent me two proverbs in an email this week after we'd talked in her living room. "These were the two I was thinking of," she starts. And she was right to be thinking of them.

I'm not leaving the Utah Vestibule behind. My church fulfills needs in my soul that can't be met in a neighborhood--mostly the need for ritual and order to my faith. But when it comes to my daily living of faith, this is where it happens. I am a far better Christian, a far better community member, now that I live here, than ever before, and it's not just that I'm older. I am better here. It is my monastery, frankly. Stability starts at home. So does conversion of heart, and don't get me started on obedience. And no murmuring allowed.

281. New Baby

Baby #29 arrived last week. Not that they're all babies, nor were they all born here, but there are 29 kids between the sycamores now. #30 is due in the fall. I'm fuzzy on the stats, though. There might be a #31 as well.

#29 was big, about a week post-due, 10 pounds. She beats Billy's 9 lb 1 oz record. Judd, her dad, told me that she sleeps like a 2 month old already, at only a week. He's not claiming victory yet. Valerie and I sigh when we see Dawn come down the steps this morning. "She'll be jogging in a week." She probably will.

Her older brother is Jay on this blog, and I'm going to name her Kestrel.

It's one of the perks of blogging. I get to name the characters.

280. Ghetto

I don't mean ghetto like how rappers mean ghetto. I mean more like how ghetto used to mean a somewhat sealed off portion of a city filled, in European cities, with Jews, and then later in America, with Italians or other immigrant groups.

I drove down McKnight Road today and thought about the kid I used to pick up, for $40 a week, and take to the summer camp where I worked, which wasn't a summer camp as much as a glorified babysitting job in the air conditioned school where I'd worked the year before. I remember how Anthony was so shocked I lived in the CITY, in the GHETTO. He meant it like the rappers do. Crime everywhere, drug dealers and pimps on every corner, shoot outs between cops and gang members.

Omigosh it's such a terrible place. Anthony hated living so close to the ghetto, out there just west of 170, and was happy that the lawsuit his mother had pursued when the teacher at his county school did something unspeakable to him (!!! That's how it was said to me when I asked him what he meant by "settlement") had paid off and they were moving out to the far reaches of West County. Where he wouldn't wind up, you know, caught in the crossfire.

Now, his obvious personal problems aside, it wasn't the first or the last time I'd heard the sentiment.

I don't live in the ghetto. I live on a tree-lined street a half block from a Victorian walking park. I know all my neighbors and not a single one of them sells drugs. Not a one. A few of them own guns, but they shoot deer with them. People hold down jobs that do not involve pimps. Really.

I know it hasn't always been this way--I know because I've been there, called the police about that. And I know that I do live closer to the scene of crime than the boy I drove to camp that summer (although I will point out that some crimes happen anywhere).

But in some ways, I wonder about the ghetto-ization of my children. They are city kids who do city things. They attend a charter school and go to a city parish. Yeah, I take them out to the country and they know an oak from a maple from a catalpa tree, but I wonder about the area of the world I skip over on my way to the trees and bugs and pit toilets. The suburbs.

I grew up in the suburbs, the same suburb all over the country. It is the same wherever you go. Yeah, it was New York Ave and South 1st Street and Orangewood Trail and Fairwick Drive and Sonora Place and Pruitt Street and North Beechwood and Spring Meadow but it was all the same dang place. By the end of it I was more than happy to shed it. The longer I live in the city the less it looks like an option. Even my parents live in the city now.

But will my kids? Or will they shun the ghetto and the 'old ways' of their parents and move out to some tacky exurb? Will they feel they were kept from something because I raised them in the city instead of the two-car-garage no sidewalk lifestyle of my own childhood?

There must be a reason beyond ignorance and fear to want to raise your child out there in the suburbs. Maybe it's yards or driveways. I don't know. I just know that as a child, I would have been shocked by the way my kids are being raised. If I knew them as peers I would be intrigued and probably a bit jealous of what they had that I didn't have. Fiona and Daisy haven't expressed similar ideas yet about friends out in the suburbs. I don't think they see the difference so strikingly yet. People live in different places. Simple as that. I don't know why county kids don't see it the same way. Maybe it's an inside-looking-out vs an outside-looking-in mentality.

Anthony would be, let me count, 27 years old now. Old enough to have a family of his own. I wonder where he lives.

279. Growing Up

"Are you going to the competition this weekend?" asks Iris. Of course Fiona is, and Iris realizes this as she says it. "Oh, yeah. I'm going and I'm going to kick Veronica's butt."

"I thought you and Veronica were different ages?" I point out.

"They combined the competitions so that there'd be enough people," she explains. Fiona, Iris, and I, I'm sure, are all thinking about Veronica for a moment, because then she continues: "You know, it's one thing to be really good at something, but if you aren't a nice person, it isn't enough."

278. Summer Evening

The sun past the park treeline, I sit facing north watching a plump gray squirrel creep along the electric wire highway above my alley. A mosquito bites me but does not leave a welt. Humming A/C units turn off and on. The air is still but more pleasant than it's been in 2 weeks. I hear the phone ring inside, Jake's voice talking with Daisy and Fiona.

Clouds this year have given dimensions to the sky that shock and please me. The sky is so big now, bigger than I remember it every being since I moved from Texas. Jake says I'm wrong but this year is different.

A squirrel gnaws, somewhat desperately, at my baby pin oak branch. I need to decide between the pin and the scarlet. With the magnolia, two redbuds, a dogwood, and the straight hybridized red/silver maple, I can't keep both oaks. Like Penny says: I can't grow every tree. I think the scarlet will win. It's already taller than my house and the pin is crooked trying to get enough light.

My foot is resting on a large patio pot containing a basil plant and a jellybean tomato. Tiny red grape-sized fruits, the woman at the market told me. Right now they are green but I have hope.

Our old dog's bowl is still on the porch. Jake, I think, suggested it as a burglary deterrent. I don't think it would fool me.

The euonymus is leaving this fall. I will replace it, perhaps with a Japanese maple. The euonymus attracts too many flies to its flowers.

Steve and Jerry's wisteria is blooming, but they moved to Amsterdam, I'm sure they don't care. I miss them. To bastardize Frost, good hostas make good neighbors.

277. Pool

Bree is so happy with the new pool. Yes, Bree, the neighbor, not one of the kids in my house. Zelda told me that she came home after the first afternoon when she and Noah came to swim and was very happy.

Our old pool was a galvanized metal horse trough. It was reminiscent of my childhood but it was a tetanus shot waiting to happen. Each summer involved more and more fiberglass patching and painting. I was done. We rolled it into the alley last fall for bulk pick up and bought this one in the springtime. Total cost was astonishingly low, especially considering that there's a freaking filter built in. The water is clean and I don't have to constantly change it out. It's smarter. Maybe not nostalgic, but smarter.

In my experience, that's not always true about new things, but this time it is.

276. What day is it?

I just published 275/365 and realized it had been several weeks since I last wrote here. To top that off, I was temporarily unaware of what the date actually was. Yup, it is summer. Totally completely summer.

And I have been writing over here for over a year, but the 365 format isn't working for me anymore. My thyroid is in check, for one, and so I don't find myself as hypergraphic and out of whack as I once did. I don't write every day anymore. Because I don't have to.

So I'm going to continue here, but I'm going to drop the 365. My other add-on blog, Ease in Fullness, is simply counted. I probably don't even need to do that, but something about these extra little blogs makes me want to number them.

How long? I don't know. I kind of like the pseudonyms, the kid conversations, the big old pat on the back for having the luck to live here. So we'll see.

275/365 Last Child in the Woods

I'm reading the book, Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv (I think Richard? I'm actually too lazy to walk into the next room to get the book). It came out a few years back. Its premise is that due to a number of reasons (fear of litigation, the Bogey Man, over-scheduled childhoods, the idea that nature should be left pristine for viewing purposes only, and so forth), children are no longer in touch with nature.

I read these statements and I nod my head. But then I look at my block and I think that even though we are in the city, even though the park across the street is one of those "look, don't touch, unless you're playing on approved fields or equipment" kind of parks, we are doing our very best to allow for this nature connection.

We camp, for starters. The older girls are in girl scouts, and as their leader, I'm making sure they learn about their environment (and not in the distant "save the rainforest" way, but in "this is an edible weed; this is a white oak; these are possum tracks" way). My yard is, due to laziness, mostly in a wild state. No pristine swaths of grass back there. The McAllisters have left toy dump trucks and shovels on the tree lawn for digging. Our kids build, and destroy, and build again, fairy houses--perhaps not the same as building their own treehouse, but they still learn something through this.

A couple of dads hunt. A couple others fish, and take their kids. Fiona will get her hunting course done this summer. We garden. I'm about 5 years away from chickens--that number fluctuates but it's not here yet. But our kids know where food comes from.

Daisy plays with these little centipedes that live in my open compost pile. Both girls know you can eat daylilies, but not Easter lilies. They know poison ivy and they have built dams on creeks and canoed down rivers.

But sitting at Irish dance the other night waiting for Fiona's class to finish, the topic amongst about 8 parents turned to vacations and camping. Many of the people there had camped as kids. I was the only one that still camped. Or had been to a state park even for a day trip.

And I realized this book wasn't for me, the woman with the book of knots sitting on top of the computer desk. And as Lisa put it in the comments over on my other blog, my kids aren't the last children in the woods but perhaps the last children in the world.

We live a good life here. I guess sometimes I forget how good.

Anybody want to live across the street from me?

274/365 Power struggle

Eliza calls just as Daisy and Fiona are getting in the backyard pool. "Do you want to come over?" Fiona asks her. No, she doesn't want to swim. Swam all day Sunday or something like that. Since they're on speaker phone and Daisy craves playmates, begging begins.

"Don't," I tell her. "If she doesn't want to come over, that's fine. Don't whine and beg."

They get off the phone. "I don't understand," Fiona says, my lovely non-game-playing child. Straightforward.

"She probably isn't too interested in swimming," I begin, "and maybe wants to see if she can pull you away from swimming to play on her terms." Maybe not. Maybe I read too much of my own experience into things.

Fiona shrugs. "I like the pool."

Three minutes later, I'm heading out with the phone. Fiona is taking the cover off the pool. The phone rings. Eliza has decided swimming sounds ok.

273/365 Sprinkler!

Mostly interested in trying to fill tiny little water balloons. But there was some running and jumping. And a lot of squealing.

272/365 Gnome

He just wasn't quite ready to bare it all for the sprinkler.

271/365 Ambulance

Just driving by. Lights and sirens on, but no police escort. Just an ambulance. Like always: a fire house is a block away.

270/365 Peony Memory

They're gone, of course, dropped their petals and shriveled up brown. The leaves are still flourishing amongst the hostas and vinca. Mine are "Sarah Bernhardt" according to the catalog they were ordered from. I like the reference if nothing else.

269/365 Spring Evening

268/365 There it is

We went outside and gathered hail. And it got darker and darker again. Finally we all decided that was enough and we went back into our respective houses.

267/365 Billy in the Hail

266/365 Hail, hail, the gang's all here

Let's go play in the hail!

265/365 Hail

So the storm passed and before the next storm we ran out and played with the hail. We are weather dorks.

263/365 The back

Note the ball tossed in the air as I took the photo.

262/365 Suddenly the tallest tree

Suddenly I have the tallest tree on the alley. Maybe not quite--there's a black walnut two houses up that is pretty tall. But this red-silver hybrid maple is close. I love this tree. But it is too tall. Too tall to live with the wires. Ah well. Life is full of risk.

261/365 Spring in the Alley

260/265 Woodpile

The King and Queen of Unfinished Projects.

When I said this to Zelda and Travis, he shook his head and said that must make them Prince and Princess. This made me laugh a long time as I thought about it.

This is our mulberry tree. It sat in the middle of our parking pad. For a year. I stacked it by myself along the side of the parking pad. It took a little over an hour. I am such a loser. Why did I wait? Because that's just who I am. That's me all over.

259/365 Admitting Your Real Estate Agent Is A Jerk

I told Bruce what his real estate agent had to say to me. And he nodded like he understood. She's on a three strike plan. She has 2 strikes right now.

I really want him to sell the house. I want new neighbors. I like having neighbors instead of an empty house.

Mary lived there when we moved in, and then that other couple bought it and stayed about a year. Bruce and his wife moved in and now out. I can't believe sometimes how we outlast people.

I have a recording of "Rambling Man" on a disc of field recordings remixed in lovely creepy ways. I listen to that song and think about what I am, really, at heart, and how I fight it. Tame it down to stay where I am.

But his real estate agent IS a jerk.

258/365 Daffodils 2011 Edition

I transplanted most of my bulbs last year. Spread them out and replanted. So I didn't get as many as before. I think they take time to recover from shock like that. These are faithful daffodils. They'll be back.

257/365 Easter took some time

But I'm back. I think. It's been raining for 40 days and nights and my basement floor is wet and I'm stressed out about many things in almost every realm of my life. But I also know that this is the way it is. For me, at least. Many things break all at once and then there is a release and everything falls into place. Happily after all.

The block? What's up? Nothing. We have new mah jongg cards and haven't played. It's too wet to chat on the stoops. I actually ran out to talk with Bruce and Zelda the other day about Bruce's house being on the market. He told stories I'd already heard and filled all the gaps in conversation and I didn't care because it was a neighbor! And I hadn't seen them in forever!

There are many things these days that I don't write about. Again, in all realms of my life. I've developed some filters, but also my readership has grown to the point that I'm uncomfortable spilling my purse all over the table so much. But this blog I can usually say what I want because, what, I'm going to say too much about my garden? About the alley? My kids playing on the swingset?

But nothing is happening. Everything is wet and sleepy. Boring. Sorry. I have some alley pictures....and my potatoes keep growing in the wet wet cool spring air. But otherwise? Nada. Nope. Nothing.

256/365 Barbecue Season Begins

Travis and Zelda put out a general invite: pulled pork with homemade sauce, bring a side dish.

I was all over that.

I made a peach blueberry pie with extra nutmeg and trotted on over. Hot dogs for kids and conversation for me. Stayed long enough that bathtime and bedtime is a rush (I'm in the thick of it right now, in fact, in the eye of that hurricane) but it was perfect. Not my kitchen full of dishes, but more than that: connection with other adults, with friends, just chatting about whatever. Anything. Who cares. Just talk.

And then knock over your wine glass, Bridgett. Ah well. It was almost empty anyway (obviously).

255/365 Won't you be my neighbor?

It's the house tour this weekend.

The house across the street is finally ready for its open house, it's debut. The open house is Sunday and I'm hoping for a response. I'm sure people will wander in, but I'm hoping for a contract.

It won't happen, but a girl can hope.

254/365 Sweet Gum Ball

For my non-midwesterners. Sweetgum trees personified. First, some stock photos.

Sweetgums are gorgeous fall color trees. Bright orange, yellow, purple, red, all on the same tree. The ones in Tower Grove, easily over 100 years old, are on fire every fall. Breathtaking.
Pretty star shaped leaves that have multiple colors. They have a spicy, pleasant smell when torn or crushed. I love the sweetgum outside my front walk--it's a street tree and it shades my front yard. Pretty and big and healthy.

But this is the seed pod it drops. And it drops them, not all at once, not all in a few weeks' time, but constantly:


And this is how things look pretty much all the time if you have a sweetgum tree nearby:Ok, not always that bad, but rake them a bit and you have a huge pile of these sweetgum balls, these absolutely useless pointy hard round things. Step on them, and they slip beneath your feet, making you prone to fall. If you're barefoot, well, you slip and your heel hurts from the points.

So they are everywhere. They get ground down into the yard so they are hard to rake out. They easily germinate, too, so I have all these annoying baby sweetgums all over my planting beds in front. And the sidewalks, as you can see below, become treacherous. This isn't my sweetgum, but Gretchen's--mine is bigger and even more prolific.
But I still love them, even with their flaws. Not every tree can be an ash or a hard maple.

253/365 Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck, Goose

I sat on the gangway steps between Big Ed's house and Zelda's. Our kids, and Auggie and his sister Kendall, were playing Red Light Green Light. A version I didn't know--it involved a walking-only yellow light option. Noah kept "slipping" on the concrete every time a caller said red light. Sure. Fiona got sent back. Daisy and Kendall got sent back. Daisy and Kendall had minor temper tantrums down by the parked cars. No one really won.

Then they switched to duck-duck-goose, the circle game where a caller walks around the circle, tapping each participant's head and saying "duck". Duck, duck, duck, duck, and then finally taps a head and says "goose!" The goose has to get up and chase the caller around the circle, trying to tag her, and if he can't, he becomes the new caller. If he can, the old caller goes into the middle (alternately called many things--we always called it the mush pot but the kids here, I think, were referring to it somehow as where a roast goose would go. Can't recall the name if they gave it one). The game is simple and is best played with an entire kindergarten's worth of children, enough to really get up and run and tag. With 7 kids sitting knee-to-knee, it didn't work as well.

At one point Daisy wound up falling down the hill onto the sidewalk, in perhaps the most dramatic pratfall in the history of drama. Arguments ensued about who had been tagged. Fiona cut through the middle to tag Bree. Auggie threw grass in Daisy's face.

It was the worst duck-duck-goose game I'd ever witnessed. I gave my girls 5 minutes. Time to go inside.

"But moooooooooom," Fiona whined. "It's so nice out!"

"Too bad. It'll be nice at midnight but we won't be outside then, either." Gah, I'm such a MOM.

252/365 Alley Clean Up

Operation Brightside has an annual spring blitz throughout the city of St. Louis. Operation Brightside is a "Cleaning and Greening" organization which I didn't realize, until searching for them just now, is St. Louis-only. So I should stop talking about it to out-of-towners like they'll understand.

Anyway, each spring they have a clean-up. The yard waste dumpsters get emptied and the streets and alleyways are supposed to get a good freshening up. This is done completely volunteer, each block handling it themselves. We've always done an alley clean up, ever since I moved here, which made me think, for the longest time, that Barb Brunwin was my block captain--I thought blocks were centered around an alley, not around a street block. Anyway, long time ago and now I'm technically a semi-retired block captain myself over on this side (although Zelda and Travis give me a run for my money on that front).

Usually we start early and go out and move dumpsters and sweep out. Cut down fence weeds and pick up trash. This year we rolled out a little after 9 in the morning and gave it a go. Some years we'll go up into everyone's parking area and really clean it out. This year, not really. I did go over Dawn and Judd's, next door, and I did my own, but not the folks behind me (pictured here with Auggie):Weeds by the old ashpit base, leaves and detritus here and there, but eh. Haven't even met those folks and they are the famous "tent" neighbors who pitched the tent through the summer last year. Bizarre.

The alley was paved several years ago, against our wishes--we liked the brick--but now that it is paved, I have to admit, it's much easier to keep clean. Oh well. (note: blue dumpster! Single stream recycling!!)
It's also a bulk-trash-pick-up date, so I had Mike go through the basement and find stuff to get rid of. Oftentimes, trucks drive up and down the alley looking for usable items and scrap to sell. They read the Operation Brightside fliers, too.So we shoveled and raked and then I stacked all the firewood in a more sensible arrangement that will allow us to park in back again (yay).Tomorrow: front yard.

251/365 Spring Uniform

Back to the overalls with no shirt Depression-era dust bowl boy outfit.

250/365 Can't get enough of this spring

249/365 Prop E

Proposition E passed yesterday.

Last fall, a robber baron who lives in our town (ok, he's not a robber baron but that's how I feel about these ultra-conservative rich folk who are trying to further ruin my state, my city, my nation) funded an amendment to the state constitution that was tagged "Let the voters decide." It was utter anti-tax bullshit. It was aimed at destroying the earnings tax in Kansas City and St. Louis--a 1% tax on the incomes of those who live in the city limits or who commute to work in the city limits but live elsewhere. It is 30% of our city's funding.

Yeah, there are probably better ways to handle 30% of the city budget. It would be nice if the city and county merged, for instance, and it would also be nice if we all held hands on the hill and shared a coke and sung a song.

The "let the voters decide" amendment was aimed at "out-state" voters. It banned cities from starting new earnings taxes--I'm not sure frankly if any cities were planning on starting them--and had this benign "oh, the people who live in KC and STL should be able to decide for themselves if they want the earnings tax, so they should be forced to hold a vote on it every 5 years to retain it."

Thing is, we already had the right, in our city's charter, to challenge the earnings tax. But we hadn't. Lots of sheep out in mid-Missouri didn't like the fear of earnings taxes and thought all us benighted city folk oughtta take charge of our own lives. It passed overwhelmingly throughout the state, although it failed in STL and KC. Which said something, I think. I think it said that all us benighted city folk don't need a bunch of anti-government folks in Rolla and Joplin to tell us what to do neither.

It's not that I like taxes, and I don't think many people do. But I like having a police force and a fire department and street cleaning and trash pick up and I think that people who spend their days here in town like knowing that if their office building catches on fire, the fire department will come and put out the fire and not charge them for the privilege.

And maybe one day we can phase out the tax, but we need to have a plan in place to replace those funds.

One plan was a higher sales tax, which of course is regressive and I'm opposed to that on those grounds alone. Another plan was higher property taxes, which isn't regressive like sales tax but would still smack most middle-class St. Louisans pretty hard. My property tax, compared to the earnings tax we pay for Mike, well, let me say that if one went away and the other quadrupled, which was the estimation by the mayor's office, well, we'd come out the losers in that plan. Really.

It seemed like a crystal clear decision to me. And, actually, to 90% of the voters in the city yesterday.

Well then.

We'll see what comes in the next 5 years. And then vote again.

248/365 Emergency Room

I read it on facebook the next day. Cecily had to take her son Micah to the ER (he was fine in the end) and Mason had to meet her there, take off work. It was the middle of the night so she had Lark and Eva with her. I read this and thought of the night Fiona's temperature spiked and we had to go to Cardinal Glennon, dropping Baby Daisy off at my parents' house around the corner.

Cecily's father lives out of town and her mom has died. Mason's parents also live elsewhere. Siblings across the country (not even sure if Mason has any). Nobody.

Except us neighbors between these sycamores. Really.

It reminded me of when Zelda got so sick a few Januarys ago. Travis called and had me come and sit in their living room and he took her to the hospital. I watched their cable TV and hoped for the best. Obviously, it all worked out, but she was sick. Sure, they could have taken their kids to either his or her parents, but Travis knew he'd be coming home and then you have to disrupt them twice and they were already a mess because mom is so sick.

And when someone is so sick, you aren't the best parent or spouse. You are focused and worried and that's when it's time for someone to just step in, not in a weird overpowering way, but just in the background, and let kids sleep.

I told Cecily this, that if there is a next time (and there always is a next time), to call. Really. Anytime of day or night. We're here and I have no trouble walking across the street to sit and wait. I actually might welcome the peace.

Jen chimed in immediately with the same offer. Zelda's not on facebook but I'm sure she would have too. Any of us would for Cecily. But Cecily isn't the type to ask--just not in her nature--so I brought up examples of how others have done this for me (Maeve's seizure in January '09) and how I've done this for others.

Really, it's nothing. If I'm willing to lend out my 30 foot ladder or borrow hedge trimmers or a smoker (meat smoker), it isn't a stretch at all to help in a crisis. Call me.

247/365 Spring Evening

Sophia's dancing in those pictures where she looks a bit twisted, fyi. Could not have been prettier last night. Alas, thunderstorms have brought us back to a more seasonable 49 degree high.

246/365 Game of Catch

It seemed the thing to do after church on Sunday. Fiona found her glove, Eliza had an extra for Daisy, and Bree and Noah were the ones who got it started in the first place. Travis and Zelda enjoyed the weather on the porch. Billy tried so hard to get the "ball? bah? ball?" and Fiona found another one for him to play with. Then the girls got bored and went to play at Eliza's, and Travis came down to the sidewalk to toss with Noah. I kept waiting for the thud to hit one of the cars, but it never happened.