#620 – Write Down Twenty Details…

…of your neighborhood block.

The first thing most people notice is the smell.  Being so close to the industrial area, there’s always a strange odour in the air depending on the way the wind is blowing.  Sometimes it’s from the distillery and other times it’s from the rendering plants.  When you can’t smell the stank of progress, you instead get the mingled culture clash of half a dozen families from all over the world cooking the food of their people.  Alone, I’m sure they smell fantastic…sometimes…but when mixed with everything else, it’s an olfactory apocalypse waiting to happen.

Other than that, I think it’s a neighborhood like any other.  There are houses all lined up along the street, with their trees and bushes and what not.  Despite my area of town being considered ‘The Ghetto’ of my city, there are a lot of nice looking houses with well-kept yards.  One house has a fountain built into a large rock in the middle of their yard, spouting a steady stream into the air.  A variety of vehicles dot the roads and driveways, from shiny nice cars to beat up old pickups.

There are three schools within a few blocks of the townhouses I live in.  An elementary, a middle, and a high school.  Two of the latter ones I actually attended so many years ago.  Each of them were always considered the ‘Stoner’ or ‘Skid’ schools (yes, even the elementary sadly).

The grass is green this time of year and the trees, of which there are quite a few, are leafy and full now.  Late bloomers this year, with our winter showing up late the way it did this year.  The lawn in my area is often unkempt and the ground is uneven, but at least once a week I see the teenage workers making some progress against the never-ending war against green.

There are kids everywhere around my townhouses.  The joys of living in a family area.  At any given time, there are screams and laughing and shouting and fighting going on right outside my door.  I’ve come to tune it out now and accept it as a fixture in the land, not unlike the shrill screams of my dryer when it’s running (I’d elaborate, but that’s not part of the neighborhood).

As I mentioned, it’s a very multi-cultural neighborhood.  At any given time, I can go for a walk and hear at least six different languages drifting from open windows or passing cars.  People seem to get along, for the most part that I’ve seen.  I’ve only seen the police a handful of times in the six months I’ve lived here (and believe me, that’s an improvement from when I was younger).  On second thought, I’m beginning to see why people don’t like this side of town.

Behind the Random: I don’t know if that was 20 details or not.  I kind of stopped caring by the first paragraph and instead just wrote what I knew about my neck of the woods and I’m too lazy to check to see if I hit the big 20.  Either way, that’s where I live.  It’s not much, but it’s where I am.