The Door

Like I said yesterday, April is the month of purple and of green. But I didn’t tell you that purple is my favorite color. And now you’ll understand why I’m especially proud of this particular creation.

I meant to write about it last summer when I did this little project, but I got sidetracked, and the newness wore off. Meanwhile, with the nicer weather, I’ve just put “The Door” back outside.




We call it “The Door” because we don’t know what else to call it. Actually, it functions as a small screen that mildly shields our backyard from busy Broadway Street.




Here’s how it got started. Remember the annual citywide “big trash” pickup? Yeah, we were laughing about how folks go trolling through the stale piles of junk looking for treasures, but we, too, ended up pulling a dubious treasure out of our neighbor’s trash—an old wooden door.

It’s really small for a door, and it was in lousy shape. I bet it was stored for a million years in the shed, or in the basement. Of course, because it was in the house next door, which was built by my great-grandpa, I kind of wonder if this door wasn’t original to the house, and therefore something he created. Maybe my grandma opened and closed this door all the time when she was growing up.

Or maybe not; lots of people have lived in the house since then, so it might be some worn-out “treasure” one of our neighbors had acquired elsewhere. Who knows.

So, we pulled “The Door” out of the trash and stuck it in our backyard, not quite sure what to do with it. We’d just been to Eureka Springs, Arkansas and were all inspired by the creative, brightly painted antiquey stuff they do down there.

What we ended up with was a beading project. After a whole lot of sanding, and the priming and the glorious painting (can life get any better when you’re painting something purple?), I strung the window opening with beads. Well, I certainly wasn’t going to put a piece of glass in it.

The beading was done concurrently with a creative project by young Ivy, who lived next door last summer.




Oh, my, I have to digress again. Remember me talking about the folks who lived next door then? The cool neighbors we appreciated so much? This was them. Ivy was the little girl going “WOW!” at the snowfall that morning.

But as it turned out, those people moved out before the end of summer, and a new couple with two little boys moved in. And actually, they too are already gone—they must’ve had a falling out with the landlord; they moved out just a few weeks ago. (Whatever. I think it’s pretty pathetic when the landlord can’t get people to stay in there even one whole year. Maybe he should try checking references, or make them sign a lease, or see if they have a job or income before renting to them. But anyway . . .)




It was last summer when I did this “Door” project, and it took several weeks. I’d do a strand or two of beads every once in a while, the door propped up on sawhorses in the basement. Waiting for the laundry to get done so I could move it into the dryer? I’d do a strand of beads. Going crazy with some endless bibliography? Break it up with some beading.

It was fun. I used to do beading in graduate school to pick up a little extra cash. The New Age types liked my creations; it was Arizona, and hey.




I invited Ivy over to do the beading with me, because I knew she was bored, and I knew she’d love the pretty beads. Who wouldn’t love them?

She started off making a necklace. Or, as she pronounced it, a neckalace. Since she’s only five or six, I helped get her started. When she told me she wanted to make a neckalace, I figured she was making one for herself. But it soon became clear that she was making it for her grandma. Isn’t that nice?

As with my work on “The Door,” it took more than a few afternoons for Ivy to finish her project, in part because we spent a lot of time visiting and getting sidetracked. Ivy had a lot of energy and a short attention span. But she kept plugging away, and I got to see her present it to her grandma. That was the same day her grandma told me they’d be moving away.

Oh, well. That’s how most renters go in this neighborhood.




I do enjoy my door and the fun I had decorating it, now that it’s back outside and standing amid spring’s new-grown grass, wild, shaggy, and unmowed, reflecting the clear purple petals of the violets and the creeping Charlie.

Small Voice from the Past

Remember the other week when we had the citywide Big Trash Pickup? I think this is related to that.

Here’s what happened. I was cutting the grass recently, and as I was getting ready to mow the terrace above our retaining wall (yeah, I know, scary proposition), I noticed a notebook lying in the grass just above the wall. Like someone down on the sidewalk had flung it up there to get rid of it.

I turned off the mower and crept down the slope to the top of the wall and retrieved the notebook. I figured one of our darling neighborhood urchins had sought a solution to the challenges of academia by ditching his notebook.

But once the notebook was in my hands, I realized something was “off” about it. I mean, I know that current styles are aping the worst of 1970s fashions (or whatever you want to call the “look” of that decade)—but this seemed like the real thing.

The notebook had illustrations of generic baseball players on it, in generic baseball-playin’ poses. It was damp from the rains. But the plastic, the little clip that said “Mead” in those seventies-style letters . . . And here’s the kicker: there were some stickers on one panel of the notebook commemorating the U.S. bicentennial, 1976. It really was an artifact of the seventies.

There was nothing in the entire notebook but the looseleaf pockets, which were all empty, except for one sheet of notebook paper. The following is transcribed exactly from that page.

My Family

In our family we have six people. We do not have any girls but my mom. My oldest brother Steve is 20. He is manger at the Sirlion Stockade.

I have a brother Brad he is 16 and works at the hospital. My name is David I am 13 I work up at Shell and Ward I clean up. I have a brother name Bill 9 he likes to swim.

In our house we have 5 bedrooms 3 bathrooms 2 kitchens 2 living rooms and a dining room. We have a big garden with tomatoes corn beans, turnips beets, peas and cabage.

Our family likes to go down to the lake. We like to fish and swim. We like to go for boat rides.

Now . . . I don’t want to go getting into other people’s business or lives, but then this notebook and David’s youthful description of his family did wind up on our property. And how did that happen, anyway?

I can only guess that the notebook had been thrown out with all the rest of the refuse on the sidewalk a few weeks ago, and that someone—probably a neighborhood kid—picked it up, looked at it, then discarded it by flinging it over our retaining wall.

So I know this David and his family—not very well at all, but I do know them. They lived two houses away from where I live now, in the house my mom was born and raised in. The parents described in the writing were good friends and neighbors of my grandma. That family still owns the house, though things are quite different now.

For one thing, the mom and dad are gone. Jim, the dad, died in 2001. The oldest brother died tragically young. The house has stood vacant since before 2001, because Jim had been in a nursing home. The three brothers haven’t done much with the house (bums lived in it for a while). I guess they’re busy with their own families.

So I find this simple writing about the family intriguing. Three of the six are gone; the big house once so full of life is now a rehabilitator’s dream (or nightmare); and the big garden in back is only a memory.

I wonder if the brothers found this writing as they were cleaning all that junk out of the house. I wonder if they read it. I wonder if it gave them pause. Currently, they are putting work into the place; word is, they’re intending to rent it out.

I know I’m dreaming. Knock on wood, touch metal; I hope they find someone decent to live there. If we’re lucky, we’ll have new neighbors whose lives will harmonize with the warm and hardworking, dignified spirits of their predecessors who walked the same floors; neighbors who will coax that black soil back there into giving life to new crops of vegetables and sprays and garlands of flowers.

It could happen, right?

Big Trash Day ’09

Thursday, April 30, was Big Trash Day on our street. Once a year the city and the garbage company have a citywide big-trash pickup they call the “Spring Clean-Up.” They publicize it in the papers and everything.

According to the city’s Web site, here is what they would pick up:

Furniture
Large bulky items (in 2007 the city announced this includes “vacuums, tables, sofas, chairs, and chester drawers”) (sic)
Televisions
Microwaves
Tied bundles of scrap material under 4 ft.
Household garbage in Allied Waste blue carts or Allied Waste clear, printed trash bags

Here is what they would not pick up:

Appliances
Tires
Plastic bags of debris, trash or garbage
Boxes of debris, trash or garbage
Yard waste
Lumber or guttering over 4 ft.
Rocks, bricks, concrete
Waste oil
Car parts
Acid batteries

Basically it’s everyone’s big chance to get rid of dead microwaves, stained, skank sofas, white-elephant window air conditioners, broken stereo cabinets, excess rotting lumber, boxes of rags and broken toys, etc. Yes, I said boxes. Look at my pictures and note how many things got picked up that weren’t supposed to, according to the rules. I’m so glad they picked up all this boxed and bagged and oversized stuff anyway; it saved us from having the neighbors try to burn it in their backyard.

It’s amazing how these houses spew forth all this just . . . crap. One of our “neighbors” (nonresident owners of a house that’s been vacant for at least a decade) finally took the opportunity to start emptying all the junk that remained in the house after his dad passed away (again, a decade ago). I swear: The entire sidewalk in front of the house was filled with rubble. It was a pile that eventually stacked up against the terrace. It looked like an avalanche of junk.

Of course, with my revised perspective post-Arkansas, I realize I should be grateful that JC at least has this annual event: Otherwise, all this trash would end up down a ravine somewhere out in the county, or else take up permanent residence in people’s front yards. Yee-haw.

Because the city doesn’t say which specific day they’ll be by to pick up the stuff, we only know which week they’ll be coming by. In this case, our half of town was supposed to have the pickup begin as soon as 5 a.m. Monday. And the trash had been accumulating for at least an entire week prior to that.

And it’s been raining. And it’s been warm. And then raining again. Ew.

But here’s the funny thing: People are going out trolling through the junk piles. Some people come by in pickups and with trailers, taking specific items like microwaves or air conditioners. Or old lawnmowers. Or old furniture. I think they intend to try to salvage it.

Others come by with the whole family, and the whole clan pokes through the rubble like they’re at a garage sale where everything’s miraculously free. Kids play in the street with raggedy, soggy toys and on bikes too small or falling apart. Women pick through damp boxes and hold up garments. The daddies search for whatever treasures they’re into. It’s kind of funny, kind of sad.

As Sue pointed out: Trolling through the trash on our street is doggone pathetic, since most of it wasn’t new to begin with. People on our street probably found their furniture and stuff in last year’s spring clean-up! We agreed that we would both be tempted to go trolling through, say, the Constitution Drive neighborhood, a doctor-and-lawyer neighborhood, where people are probably throwing out brand-new stuff they’ve never even used. Old-style Blackberries and hopelessly out-of-date Kindle 1’s. (One man’s trash . . .)

Anyway, after almost two whole weeks of having the sidewalks buried in greasy, skank rubble, and having nightly trollers driving by slowly, peering intently at the filthy piles, a series of garbage trucks came Thursday afternoon and took it all away.

There were three garbage trucks for our block: I kid you not.