Foraging Across the Boundaries

We still drive "around the block" a couple times a week to see what's going on. The "block" is the geo/demographic area in Kennydale encompassed by 36th and 40th Streets North on the south and north respectively and Park and Meadow Avenues North to the west and east. Now there are two more cross streets, 37th Place and 38th, which weren't even a gleam in the traffic guy's eye when I was a kid. So it's really four blocks, a pretty considerable piece of ground with a lot of action to keep track of; but somebody has to do it.

When I was a kid, before daily paper delivery took my observation opportunities to the next (and the next!) level, occasional foraging for food and/or flowers provided the cover for synergistic snooping. In the pre-spring, after forsythia but before daffodils, I always collected at least one bouquet of pussy willows for the dining table and to give to some of the neighbors, Mrs. Crotts, maybe, who lived in the house the Robbins next door have now owned for many years.

Later, during spring and early summer there was actual good food out there! Next door, to the south on what is now Swan-Vue - and also up the street at the Kosney's- was a particularly early variety of sweet cherry that was good for stealing before our own became ripe. Plums, too. Then came blackberries, the wild trailing kind. Along the ditches and in undeveloped lots there were often piles of brush and brambles that supported really healthy vines. One of the best places was right across the street at Herb and Diana's old place. I could pick around the block and get enough for at least one big pie and did so a couple times every year.

Largely via this wandering foraging lifestyle I came to know everyone, who was nice, scary, a jerk, etc. and how much of an incursion I could safely make or test on various properties. I wasn't alone, of course; we all accepted a much more casual definition in our minds of property rights in those days. Kids wandering everywhere! Many years later, after a couple of mildly uncomfortable ummm... interactions with some neighbors, I learned to revise my boundarial expectations. Kids cutting through here to and from the bus still doesn't bother me, though. Still, for the most part, my "around the blocking" is limited now to driving with a critical eye on real estate development. I know where those boundaries are, man. Everywhere!