#4: the Vine neighborhood in the summertime

Just last night the neighbs and I took the hound for a walk around his new digs. We walked down to the river and sat a while, then we walked under the spreading trees through the elegantly-landscaped and cobbled median of our favorite boulevard, then past all the old apartment buildings and craftsman homes back to our yellow stucco with the big slice of window. It was dark and still hottish warm outside, some of my favorite weather, and we bumped into several friendly people and their (mostly)friendly dogs.

I'm not telling you this, dear reader, to gloat about how awesome my new neighborhood is. Okay, so maybe I am, a little. I still feel like a kid on Christmas morning the year she unwrapped her first-ever bicycle. I can't believe this place belongs to me...at least for a year. But the thing is, I'll still miss the Vine neighborhood in the summertime. After all, I've lived there on and off for the last eleven years, and it's a pretty charming place (I'll leave out the condescending "in its own way" out of love and respect for my long-time home).

A substantial part of what I love about my new place is how new it feels. It reminds me of being nineteen and moving into a place on Oak Street, the first place that felt like my own. I'm washing my dishes in my sink. I can entertain people in my living room. It didn't matter that it was shared, because she was my roommate, my consciously chosen companion whom neither genetics nor university bureaucracy had compelled to string along with me.

Upstairs at Oak Street was only the beginning, though. For example, later would come downstairs at Oak Street. To this day, when I walk by that old place I am taken aback at how huge the tree in front of the house has become. There's nothing to make you feel older like discovering how much a tree has grown. After Oak Street came some time in other neighborhoods, but then it was back to Merrill, then on to Pioneer, and finally Park Place.

I love biking around Vine on summer evenings. I love how all the houses are glorious and dilapidated, how the elderly live side by side with obnoxious college students. I love seeing people's gardening and their dogs on tie-outs and behind fences. I love how, the first truly warm day (or even before, if the winter has been a bad one), the streets fill up with kids playing frisbee in their flip-flops.

I love having a number of friends who live within walking distance of my place, and knowing that when they move it'll probably be within a three-block radius. I love that, when I walk down a number of streets in the neighborhood, I know what the houses look like on the inside because that's where so-and-so used to live. Although, here's a funny something: I lost a house. About three years ago I was driving home really late one night and my eyes came to rest on a house on Wheaton and I knew with entire certainty that that was the house where I had first hung out with my long-time boyfriend. The next morning I couldn't have told you which one it was, and to this day I have no idea, despite the fact that I have scrutinized every house on Wheaton every day for the past two years on my way home from school trying to remember.

It isn't a perfect neighborhood, it has traffic and junkies and trash and creepy people, but I'll miss it for more reasons than just the familiarity. I remember one afternoon -- it was getting on towards fall, I guess -- a family on Oak between Vine and Walnut had pulled some old mattresses out to the curb for bulk trash day, and three or four little kids were jumping up and down on the mattresses out by the curb, with the leaves just turning bright colors and beginning to fall, one late afternoon and the light was so yellow, and I remember that moment just as if it was preserved in that liquid amber just slanting through the treetops.

Yeah, like that.