neighborhood

Neighborhood! It’s been a long time coming.

We took a walk in our new neighborhood today. And I mean, “neighborhood.”

The place we left was technically a suburban city restricting the growth of the City of Milwaukee on the Southwestern corner of town. With a population of just under 37,000 it’s big enough to have services and affluent enough to attract lots of MAGA voters — only part of the reason we were willing to move with so little provocation. To say that most of the population there feels privileged is not a hasty judgment, or unfounded one at all.

I mentioned a couple days ago that the city of Milwaukee has/had a wonderful park system. Well, our new digs are IN the city, and the closest park is about 0.4 miles from the park. On our Saturday morning walk today we were delighted to see that multiple games of school soccer were going on — to be replaced by another group of multiple games with different aged kiddies. What a delight! Lots of parents in attendance (and grandparents). Cars parked up and down the street with dads carrying lawnchairs and moms carrying water bottles and shin-guards. Wonderful to see.

It’s almost like our place 20 years ago in Cudahy where we lived adjacent to a city elementary school and I got to talk to the kiddos through our adjoining fence whilst they were on “recess” and I was working in the garden. You know how it goes…. “Hey mister, what’cha doing?” And of course there were also questions about the ghost in our building which peculiarly placed windows (to the kids I guess) and shadows and light gave rise to very imaginative suppositions which I was happy to …. well…. not exactly deny. 🙂

We live half a mile from the local library. Also doing double duty as our local polling place. The city services Ward yard is about 1 mile. There are loads of dog walkers, who actually seem pretty well leash and poop-bag trained. But, sadly, we have not yet seen very many actual recreational walkers. The fact that our street is one three blocks long before it dead-ends 1/2 block from our front door into a crosstreet which also dead ends into it. So, we’re on a sort of closed loop with two semi-busy streets at either end of an L-shaped residential neighborhood.

It’s going to take time getting used to this place, but so far most of the signs are positive!