It’s a neighborhood of front porches and sidewalks. Where people go for walks and stop and chat if they feel like it or keep on going with a wave if they don’t. Either is okay. Where there are friends to play with across the street and the lady next door who walks her dogs twice a day will stop to talk to you about the pumpkins that you carved and your latest Lego creation. Where you know you could be inside washing dishes, but you ended up standing outside as night falls talking to one of neighbors from the other side about schools and the way Birmingham used to be and the way it might be again, and then the new dad from three doors down walks by, slowly and deliberately, cradling his newborn, stopping to show him off, to say that the baby really likes to be outside, the outdoors seems to calm him.
And he walks on, over the hill, into the cool evening, through the neighborhood.
Life sounds good. Porches were TV before electricity, perhaps. And still more entertaining. And no lost remote control to find!
I grew up in a neighborhood like that; glad to hear that there are still some today.
That’s awesome! I love front porches. We have one, but our neighborhood isn’t quite as friendly as yours.
I love and miss neighborhoods like that! We lived in one almost 20 years ago, in LA of all places. Lovely. And the perfect neighborhood in autumn!
After my recent burglar experience, I can love that your boys have that block right there while we here do not have such peace on the NY harbor. Inter house connectedness as you have there works against burglars….and long winters up here and other job stressors for many in a hyper culture work against inter house connectedness. So a burglar then needs only a window that is totally vegetation covered after he has rung the doorbell for five minutes which tells him about people abscence and no guard dog. If there is a security system, it does not stop him but restricts him to several minutes. Fortunately he the burglar and I got to talk about autumn leaves as I was rear choking him 30 feet from our house….me: ” no…I must disagree….I think the orange leaves are usually oaks not maples….but you used a holly tree just now for window breaking cover…didn’t you find it prickly?”. Him: “Oh I’ve had worse with climbing roses…but thanks for the concern…cough…cough.”
One year and we are blue mountain bound…God willing. I want what your block has.
I, too, remember such a neighborhood from my childhood in Chicago. I remember sitting on our front porch feeling a gentle summer breeze while reading Homer’s The Odessy.
That looks like a great neighborhood to trick or treat in!
Beautiful! It’s so nice to read about your beautiful little corner of the world while sitting here in one of the “outer boroughs” of New York City. We don’t have porches, we have stoops. And they certainly provide a good vantage point for watching the world go by. But, sadly we can’t have pumpkins outside or they will end up smashed. What is it about a beautiful pumpkin that calls out to passersby, “smash me”? God bless you and your family.
That is one fabulous pumpkin.
You have described both the block I grew up on and the street I live on today–both in an “outer borough” of NYC. Good neighbors are a precious jewel.
I was wary of it. This was the first pumpkin we’ve carved since we moved here. In Indiana, we had a flat garage roof to which we had access through a door on the second floor. We always put the pumpkins up there, safe from reach. Here, we didn’t carve the pumpkins till a few days before Halloween (which was still too soon – I forgot about this Alabama warmth – they were completely collapsed three days after we carved them and had to be trashed) and I took them inside every night before I went to bed.
Yeah, since moving back to the South I don’t carve them until the day of. This year we wound up with three gi-normous pumpkins from a Methodist church in the next town over from ours — I couldn’t find a pumpkin anywhere in my own town last Saturday — and at the party my teenaged daughter was throwing with a few of her friends, we had a guys-vs-girls pumpkin-carving contest (jury’s still out on who won, and will be out until the end of time). That was two days ago, and they don’t look all that toothless yet, but they will. In fact, I really need to pay attention. The likeliest scenario is that I will forget all about them for about a week, and then one day walk up to the front steps and notice a bunch of mouldering goo. Oh, yeah. Halloween.
But the design on yours is totally cool. Our guys-vs-girls should have checked it out before they picked up their knives.