4a. Mike's Thoughts on Alley

"You know, alley clean up day always reminds me of 'Mending Wall'," Mike said when I read him yesterday's entry.

"But isn't that where there are cows?" I said with a giggle--it's an inside joke between us. But then I considered.

Good alleys make good neighbors? Because out front, we can just wave and go about our lives, but when you share power lines, dumpsters, and car parking space, you have to negotiate better?

I remember sitting on the remains of an old ash pit behind me, behind the house I see out my kitchen window, with a lukewarm cup of coffee. Anne sat next to me on the step. We were worried about the developer at the end of the block, and Anne had pretty much alienated most of my side of the alley. I was caught between my front-door neighbors and my back-door neighbor, who was the first neighbor I'd met, who got rid of my cucumber beetles, who sat with the DEA with me in her dining room going over our evidence on the drug dealers. Anne was one of the good guys--so was everybody else, though.

"We will probably lose," she told me realistically. The developer had the alderman on his side and we were just folks. Voters, sure, but not influential, not really. "Get your bottles of wine ready, maybe we'll split one when we lose."

We didn't lose. And in the end, I remained good neighbors and good friends with both sides of the alley. But it certainly took a great deal of wall-mending and wall-removal to walk that fence line.