Caring about your neighborhood pays off, once in a million years

We took a walk around the block last night, popped in on neighbors, saw Daisy and Rosemary...very relaxing and grown-up seeming. The particular stretch we stopped on, one street over, has three homes on the neighborhood Home Tour at the end of April, so I thought, as the wimmen folk done talked, I would peruse the alley that runs perpendicular to this block of homes and see just how much effort/manpower/trash bags would be needed to clean it up a smidge. Well, it will be a bit of a pip, but it can be done in an afternoon. But, in some overgrown grass behind a derelict detached garage, I found this, surely the greatest grass find since Jeff Beaumont found the ear: I mean, huh? There must have been some sort of accident with time travel or a particle collider or some shit! Plus the backing is still on it. Very curious! It is now pinned up in my workspace.

Pig...and a ghost of 32 Bonner?

A survivor of 32 Bonner...perhaps the only one

Hey! Last Friday I was cutting the grass and some sort of SUV-ish vehicle went around the block and paused in front of our place...then they came around again...so I stopped my lawn-tending to say "Can I help you folks?" Was concerned that it was going to (another) case of "We'll give you 500 bucks to go to Indian Lake with us for the weekend," as happens CONSTANTLY.

Turned out that Phil (that's his lovely wife Karen at left) grew up in our li'l shitbox! I was all "Dude, let's take a tour!" He'd not been in the house since moving in 1959!

These people have fifteen cats on their land up northways, so a common bond was firmly established...

Old Phil got downright moved as he saw rooms where he played and slept and such.

"This was my bedroom...my little sister slept in here with my folks..."

He also got a right whippin' [outside the bathroom door] for making a dummy from a pair of jeans and a shirt and throwing it onto the street from the bedroom window, just in time to shock the hell up out of his mom! Quel rascal!

The most exciting part for me was that he had SURVIVED living in our house.

Exciting, until I saw...he cast no shadow.