Today I took a bus from closer to the house and then walked a different 1.5 mile to work. This might not be always as pleasant a walk as the other route's--although today it was snowing and therefore beautiful--but it's a good idea to get the part I cannot control done sooner, and done with a more reliable bus than the previous, slightly more direct one I had used. A mile and a half is a fine walk, but having to split it around a bus that might or might not come vexed me, and not to walk from one stop to the next because the bus would skip me while between them wasted my time.
I walked through newer developments that attempt to mimic the front porch neighborhood and fail: The houses have garages on the alleys instead of bulging out of the facade, belying their true significance, but just as these icky bulging garage houses' residents enter from their garages and hardly use their front doors at all, so too with these houses. They don't have mailboxes at their houses but use one central deposity per block, located at the head of the alley so you can get your mail from your car as you drive home. I saw people walking their dogs in the alleys, not on the sidewalks in front. Even graveled front yards, which no one can enjoy aesthetically, are tightly fenced in. Bah.
Closer to Colfax I passed through a much more modest neighborhood of houses that would not be out of place in eastern Connecticut if their lots were slightly bigger. My neighborhood is older and crumblier and last month a man was sleeping on our porch, but this one I walked through today felt a lot less friendly. Even some of the side-streets (running north and south) didn't have sidewalks.
Being my sister's sister, I wanted to take the shortest route when the legal route seemed unnecessarily long. Almost at work, I could have curved around a bend of road or cut through a school's playgrounds. Naturally I cut through the playground, but I won't again: by the time I was near enough to see that the chainlink fence was locked, I would have had to do the dreaded backtracking to return to the legal route. I scaled the eight-foot fence easily enough, since I could use the mid-way rail as a foothold, but I do not have the upper-arm strenth to push myself away from a fence on the descent and didn't relish dropping along it and snagging my favorite flesh. I could get no purchase in Dansko clogs. So I shook them off, toed down the fence the old-fashioned way, and regained my shoes without having to put my sock feet in the snow. (Yes, socks: it was snowing.) The opposite side of the yard was easier: shorter fence.
It is a private school and therefore trespassing more than going through a public school's field might have been. So I'll be legal from now on. And I imagine I don't look like a tall child anymore but like a freak. Le sigh.
One Sunday in December, opening the curtains in the living room, I saw a man curled up on the porch, against the house, kind of under the swing. If I had been alone I would called the police, but as it was RDC went outside and woke him. Does that make me a wimp? or prudent? While RDC and he spoke, I put some Clif bars and fruit in a bag, and gave it to RDC as he came in and out to give the man bus fare (so the man said). He had been let out of the joint, his phrase again, at midnight the night before and had been walking home until he got too tired. (RDC wondered to me later why our porch, and I suggested that it was the first on the block not to have its light on, let alone additional festive ones.) He wore only a light jacket and asked if we could spare him one, and it struck me later we could have replaced our own even if we didn't have any unused ones around. Sorry, man.
I'm thinking I should keep a spare pair of gloves in my pockets and get a leash for my own. I can't give away my mittens but it is on the days I particularly don't want to give up my own gloves that the gloveless's red fingers seem coldest. CLH did give me a new pair of violet chenille gloves in my stocking, so I could carry the lavender pair.
Or just donate them. This weekend I finally made a trip to Goodwill, with books and a set of mixing bowls and another of glasses and clothing and toys and Dan'l Bloone.