Freshly Bitter-Sweet

Each day my colleagues and I walk to lunch; this week the walk has been different. As you walk down Division Street's broken sidewalks that are flanked by short, crumbling retaining walls crowned by rusted and bent chain link fencing, you look beyond at the vacant houses and lots and sometimes think about their past lives. Like this one house that has the most beautiful live oak trees and I can image looking at them from the houses windows after waking from a nap. People who lived there used to do that. The boards are still on the windows... It's eyes are still shut. Maybe the house is just napping and will wake and look up at the live oaks. For now it will remain sleeping along with the other houses; meanwhile, their yards are more alive than ever. No one is there to hold them back from growing into what they want to be. There are no weeds there because no one is there to call something a weed and pluck it from the earth. With this, we've noticed as of this week, the sidewalks of Division Street are graced by the presence of blackberries, freshly bitter-sweet blackberries.