4. Alley

I like alleys. All of our "services" happen back there--power lines, phone, cable, sewer, trash pickup. Many of us park back there, either in tight garages or parking pads. Every May, we gather as a block (the two halves of the block that share the alley--my side of Halliday and the adjoining side of Magnolia--and clean it. Due to this alley cleaning day, I met my neighbors behind me long before my neighbors across the street.

Our alley used to be brick paved, but our alderman had asphalt put down a few years back. We didn't want it, for various reasons (for some, because brick slows you down, for others, because we like the still-usable to be used). But traffic doesn't seem to go much faster on the asphalt--those threatening dumpster hooks are a good speed-bump--and it sure is easier to keep clean.

City alleys, with their dumpsters instead of private trash cans, are often victims of dumping crime--folks who don't know how or can't be bothered to haul away an old mattress, concrete chunks, construction detritus, or auto parts, like to dump them in the anonymous dumpsters. But my alley is patrolled by several neighbors who keep developers from cheating and have the direct phone line to the "dumpster investigator." But that's not all we do in the alleys.

Kids learn to ride bikes. We trade gardening secrets and produce. We sit on the bump that used to be an ash pit across the way and plot against the developer at the end of the street. We gossip about city politics. We clean up graffiti and watch each other's (literal) backs. We admit pregnancies and steal blackberries. Kids sneak from yard to yard.

My uncle Glennon took down a nasty weed tree that was on the border of our alley and our property this past fall. Now I have a view of everything that happens back there--people trolling for bulk trash that's set out once a month, the neighbors going to work. My kitchen window looks out into the alley and I find I spend a great number of tiny moments at that kitchen window.

People who live without alleys don't seem to get what the big deal is. My brother, down in suburban Houston, thinks it's a waste of space that could be more yard (hmm, and more to mow?). But I wouldn't trade it for more yard or a garage on the front of my house with a driveway. I don't want to drag a green waste cart to the curb and watch trash trucks drive down my street. And I don't want power lines in the front of my house, endangering the street trees. Put all that in back.

3a. Sycamore Photos

View looking east on Utah (sycamore just left of center)

Somewhere in Tower Grove South--this one is like one we lost on Halliday, with the twist and lean.

The sycamore--one of two or three left standing on my block--is behind the sweetgum (which just looks like "tree" here, I know, winter and all)...

Two girls play on a sycamore stump, from a tree taken down after a storm convinced the city forestry department that it was dangerous and ill.

3. Sycamore

Dutch Elm Disease killed the street trees in St. Louis. All the American Elms that lined our streets, and so many other cities' streets, were dead.

St. Louis responded by planting sycamores. The big bark-shedding white trees with leaves as big as two of your hands and the little "sycamore balls" as we called them growing up, with the puffy little seeds that floated off on the wind.

Sycamores grow fast and die badly. They shed limbs--onto your car. They are the tallest trees on the block, and then they get struck by lightning. The one that used to be behind us terrified me. I just hoped it would hit Steve's garage instead of my house. But when the developer took it down in favor of a 4 car garage for her "condo" building (4 tiny apartments, still for sale 2 years later), it changed all the shade and sun patterns in my yard.

Now, when the sycamores die, which they do, being over 30 years old on average, the city knows better than to plant all of the same tree. My street has more than just sycamores--American basswoods, some black oaks. Sweetgums, annoying ornamental fruit trees, and the cursed silver maples.

But I still like the look, however fate-tempting it may be, of a street lined with the same tree every twenty feet or so. It unifies things (although, in the case of south city, most of the houses look the same, too). I would never plant one on purpose, mind you (see two paragraphs above), but I like that they're here.

2a. Stoop Photos

2. Stoop

In my "About Me" section below, I mention sitting on my south city stoop drinking coffee and chatting with neighbors. This is the view from the stoops on my block, down towards Grand Ave. You can see the double set of steps--the "stoop" in my definition is that first set that goes from the sidewalk to the level of the front yard. The second set goes up to the porch.

The first set of steps is the line between public and private space. Businesses leave fliers in the handrail of the first set of steps, but rarely come up onto the porch to deliver them. The mail, of course, is delivered at the front door (which is becoming more and more rare in America these days), but most interaction happens at the first set of steps.

We sit and watch kids play from there--the 5 or 6 moms who either live on my side of the block or know that's where the action is. And yes, I often have a coffee mug in my hand. The kids picnic on the steps, or right above or below them, smoothing out a blanket and producing picnic food from each house--peanut butter sandwiches, carrot sticks, leftovers from the night before, hummus and tortilla, fruit in season.

The stoops on my block are over 100 years old--the western half of the block was built in 1903 and 1904, and my house was the first one in 1905 on this side. The concrete is not in good shape. Mary's is crumbling dangerously, and mine is starting to eat out from underneath. Weeds grow in the cracks, and Trisha comes out with hot vinegar water to kill them (I pluck them from their homes and toss them into the street to be swept away on street cleaning day).

There are intermittent steps, too, that don't lead to the front doors of our houses, but to the gangways between them. This produces a cascade of stairs, I suppose you could call it, heading slowing down the hill towards Grand. The houses are so close, we can spread out between two or three sets of steps and still manage a conversation easily between kid noises and dramas.

It was on Mary's stoop that I sat when the gang walked up our street and attacked Joe and my husband. It was on Trisha's stoop that we ate take out ice cream on the hot 2006 power outage days. Standing on George's stoop, he told us about his wife's cancer diagnosis. We met Elizabeth's new baby from Korea after she brought her down to the stoop (again, the outside world meeting the inside).

Mine has the best shade of the houses on our side where we tend to congregate--that black oak and sweetgum keep the front of my house pretty cool, while Mary has lost a maple and Trisha an ash in the past three years. But it also is prone to mosquitoes due to the ivy growing right next to it. Since they don't bother me, that's where I usually start out on any given warm afternoon. I migrate, though, because conversation is more important than shade.

1. Threshold

My front door is wide. So wide, the screen/storm door in front of Hickory the cat there? Cost more than four months of Maeve's preschool tuition. I use that statistic a lot when the girls let it bang shut on each other. Wide enough that all three cats, if they choose to cooperate, can sit and view the outdoors. Dara the geriatric rottweiler mix usually hovers behind them, waiting for the UPS man to bring her a biscuit. Or just to bark at every other living creature that comes within earshot.

Out my door, I see Jim's house. Our front doors look straight out at each other, although our houses aren't exactly mirror images. I've lived here long enough, it was Mary's house first. And then that weird couple from New York moved in. Now it's Jim's, with his wife and his kids and his hawaiian shirts and dog and sandbox in the back of the truck. Next door to him, the white stone house? That's Doug's place. Independently wealthy man of mystery Doug. Not much to view there. Jim's house has more going on.

Hickory and Dara may watch for juncos and dogwalkers, but I've looked out this door at many things: the badges of FBI and Secret Service agents; homeless men with stolen goods to sell me; neighbors bearing meals after babies are born. I watch the sweetgum tree turn yellow and the black oak turn brown. Kids run up and down the sidewalk while folks east of us walk past on their way to the park.

I like the view.

Coming Soon Enough

I remember standing behind my grandmother's garage with my brother, or maybe a cousin, in this little space between the building and the cyclone fence. Next to us were grapevine trellises, with vines that produced a champagne grape I never tasted. It was a small secret place too small for adults to squeeze into comfortably. Clothesline, white paint, gravel driveway, the smell of gasoline and grease deep in the ground all around us.

That's what I'm hoping for. Except not about a property line in Overland, but about bits and pieces of south St. Louis all around me. Probably some photographs. Maybe daily, once Conlocutio is done, but until then, just little bits. Maybe once a month for now.