I want to convey a sense of Shorewood, the friendliness, the quality of life, and the problems. I never intended to start out with a problem, until I saw those little white signs in Atwater Park. Here's the blog I had originally written that day:
6/29/06 On Tuesday a man named Joe M came to our door. He said he's starting an environmentally friendly lawn-care service, no power mower exuding fumes and drowning out conversations, just an old push mower that he transports by bike on a small flatbed that he himself welded together from scrap metal. So yesterday Joe M and I spent the morning pulling bindweed, ragweed, creeping Charlie, and other predators intent on strangling or crowding out my flax, cosmos, poppies, and asters. I used to love my
front yard garden. Now it's a full-time job to control it!
A teenager who lives nearby walked past, saw me weeding, and said, "Today I'm becoming a travelling kid." He and a friend are taking off for the summer, headed first for Minneapolis where they'll probably stay in a squatters' camp, or hang out with crust punks (I think the crust implies they never take showers), maybe sometimes they'll sleep under bridges. "Hmmm, what do your parents think of this?" I asked, and he indicated his father didn't mind! "Well, goodbye if I don't see you again," he said as he left me, then added, "until the end of the summer."
About an hour later the travelling kid passed again, a small backpack on his back with a blue sleeping mat rolled up on top of it; he was off to change his life. Anyway I think so. I did something similar when I was twenty, travelled in Europe and North Africa, often alone, and that determined the rest of my life. Though I didn't stay in squatters' camps, I once slept in a flophouse in Rome. And our son Eli went off to Taiwan when he was nineteen; 22 years later we have four half-Taiwanese grandchildren.
As I weeded a spot that's been ours for 37 years, I was thinking that now it's the wanderer passing ME by. But this one didn't seem ready.
Later on I ran into the travelling kid's father and asked about his son's trip. "He's not going anywhere," he replied.
