Neighborhood update

Woah, what a beautiful afternoon, with the happy sound of melting snow and a dizzying array of puddles to jump over when walking the hills of this neighborhood. A pair of girls three houses up the block built a snow pig – a remarkable achievement, down to its curly tail. I almost felt the competitive urge to maybe sculpt a goat in our front yard, thinking if this caught on, we would have a block of farm animals and people would drive up just to admire our multivarious (isn’t this a word?) talents. I held back because I worried that neighbors would come out and ask if perhaps I had toppled my feather or otherwise fallen precipitously into some state of mental decline (not in so many words, of course). Besides, it all looks so WET out there in the snow. Still, it was a gorgeous late afternoon.

I am concerned, though, about the family across the street – the one with the flamingos (see post, February 8). Or rather, the now you see them, now you don’t flamingos. Because the birds are all gone. And this is not the type of clan that picks up their decorations when they are done with them – the adorable Christmas trees are still standing, tilted, but standing on the porch, and the lawn chair, last used I believe in October of 2003, sits where it did then, on that warmish fall day. Did we have a flamingo heist in the neighborhood? Bad enough that mailboxes get batted down every now and then, and swatches of toilet paper still cling to tree tops from brazen teen ‘decorating’ efforts of years back (such a quaint American custom, why ever hasn’t it caught on elsewhere?), but stealing plastic birds crosses the line. Next thing you know they’ll be toting away my rusty upside-down wheelbarrow which I forgot to put away in the garage for the winter, and from there it’s only a matter of days before they start digging up the climbing rose bushes. Young people have no manners.