The Neighborhood Woods

Some Green Amid The Suburban Pavement

There’s this small path between blocks just around the corner of our house that pedestrians use to cut through, maybe a 25-30 foot strip of dirt and mulch.

The homeowners near the strip understand that people are going to be cutting through, so they put up a fence and maintain the little path to prevent erosion and such. I take Pip through there all the time on our walks.

The strip is a little slice of woods amid our standard, city neighborhood.

Walking through there recently brought me back to a strip of woods that existed near my parents’ house when I was growing up in the burbs. It was the only remaining undeveloped house lot - maybe an acre - in the neighborhood and as such all the kids used to hang out in there, climbing the trees and causing trouble.

For the record, it was back there in that little woodsy lot where I swore out loud the first time, discovered that I was not immediately struck by lightning as the nuns had told me would happen and began to question basically my entire existence.

Anyway, when new neighbors finally did buy and tear down the woods of that lot so they could build a house, the neighborhood kids never forgave them. They had removed our playground. We shunned them, created trouble for them, let our dogs poop on their grass. Dumb, nasty kid stuff. All because we felt those people had stripped us of our special space. Kids can be stupid and all these years later, I kind of feel bad for harboring that anger.

We don’t have any lots left like that in our current neighborhood, only this little strip reminding us of what was once here. And now that Little Bean is getting older, all the kids are beginning to widen their territorial reach. We’re starting to see kids come through that we don’t know - or rather don’t know their parents. Many of them come from the other side of that little woodsy strip, like it’s a portal or doorway to the other neighborhood.

So if it comes to it, that’s where we’ll make our stand.

For now, the dog sniffs around, finds a tuft of grass to pee on and moves on from one strip of pavement to the other through the tiniest of jungles in our bedroom community. And if these folks ever take the strip away, I promise myself to go easy on them and find some other grass to wander through. It’s the least I can do.