Yesterday I walked to the store to get a half gallon of milk for our morning coffee and pick up a newspaper since we cancelled our service while on vacation. In the shopping complex we have a Neighborhood Service Center where people can do all sorts of business like buy stamps, pay their phone and water bills, or even apply for or renew their passports. A stout older woman works at the center with her cushy rolling desk chair and every piece of office equipment surrounding her. Her little box of an office is cluttered with reams of forms, every kind of pen imaginable, and two computer monitors, an equal number of keyboards, and an ancient manual typewriter. She's obviously a smoker, coughing her way through the forms, stamping them with one of those metal stampers that looks more like a garden tool for planting bulbs than it does an official city document stamper. Her voice is raspy and when she laughs, she rattles.
I've been in a couple of times to check on a bill or pick up some stamps and even to apply for my passport. She's helpful and kind, but rarely looks up from her busy hands to look anyone in the eye. She's truly a fount of information and refers to everyone as "hon" or "darling" even the elderly women who totter on their walkers.
But yesterday morning, I arrived at the grocery store before it opened (didn't grocery stores used to be open 24 hours a day?). So I stood in the parking lot, scanning my options and contemplating a trip to Starbuck's across the street so I could just order coffee instead of get milk to make it. The sign above the Neighborhood Service Center is a bold neon sign, but like most of the signs in the shopping center, many of the letters are burned out. The same is true for the Army and Marine recruiting center just three doors down from the service center, where the sign reads "...ecruiting ..my..rine..." It's a wonder anyone signs up with an advertisement that always makes me look twice because I swear it says "...my urine..."
The Neighborhood Service Center sign, though, made me really laugh as it read "...hood Service Center" and frankly, that's exactly what it is...the service center for our 'hood.
Once the grocery store opened, I got my milk and checked out with June, the grocery clerk who looks like Annie Lennox. I've told her so and she claims everyone tells her that though she doesn't have the paycheck to back it up. June is warm and wonderful and I don't care how long her line is, I always get in it because she cheers up my day. But yesterday morning, no one was in the store but me and so I pointed out to June the funny signs in the rest of the shopping center. "Well, ya know," she flashed her Annie Lennox smile, "I believe everything happens for a reason. Someone out there has a sense of humor about this area of town, that's for sure!"
And now, the sun has pushed away the threat of rain and Ann is sweating in the backyard ripping out thick beds of English Ivy, the bane of our existence. Ivy grows invasively all over the city, but finds a particularly healthy environment here in the 'hood. Most of our neighbors don't pull it out so it spreads almost as quickly as the rats. So even though Ann may clear out the jungle of vines in our backyard, the ivy will creep back through the fence from the neighbor to the east who never does any yard work and when she does, it's certainly not ivy clean up.
Still, Ann loves ripping and stacking all the vines in addition to tearing down the shaky wooden fence between our new neighbor to the south and us. With a new dog on the way we're getting ready to put in another new fence along the south side to match the one we built last spring on the north side. The whole yard needs landscaping and I'm thankful Ann is excited about the project. She's drawn sketches of what she wants it to all look like and even mapped out which plants she'll put where. Her biggest dilemma, next to the ivy though, is the neighbor's insistence on having a compost bin where he throws food scraps.
"Rats," Ann complains, "He's just inviting rats."
But that's life in the 'hood, ya know? Burned out signs, overgrown ivy, and fat rats. There's no place like home...or perhaps that should be h...me.
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