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Grackles of Midway
Sep. 2nd, 2024 04:08 pm So, I need to start with a lovely cartoon that I found this morning and shared on Facebook with the caption, "Me, in Midway."
Image: Cartoon of a grackle (a brown bodied bird with blue head) realizing that their ugly neighborhood isn't, if you look closely at things.
I really love living in Saint Paul's Midway neighborhood most of the time. We have a really active community.
Our Buy Nothing group is beyond the Pale. I can wax lyrical about how I feel about the folks on that Facebook list, plus it's dead useful. Shawn and I just picked up a folding table that she was excited to find because it will be helpful to have immediately after her knee surgery. It was all bent-up on the bottom shelf, but I managed to spruce it up with two can's worth of spray paint. We may end up passing it back along once she's done with it, but that's the beauty of that group.
I love that our neighborhood has actively adopted "the" possum as our neighborhood symbol. (There are many possums, we just call all of them The Midway Possum.) We track The Midway Possum on Facebook, share photos of her, make art, and write poems and haiku in her honor.
The neighborhood has even organized volunteer garbage pick-up. We are an insanely busy neighborhood, with Snelling and University (and Fairview and highway 94) as part of our neighborhood. We have the Stadium and the light rail so we get lots and lots of people passing through, dropping garbage everywhere. This should be something that the city of St. Paul takes care of, but they don't, and no amount of haranguing will motivate them. So, every first Sunday of the month, a horde of Midway residents don safety vests, pickers, and garbage bags and collect literally hundreds of pounds of garbage.
I know the names of my actual neighbors. The other day when I ran out of garlic powder, I was able to text several of my next door neighbors and get some! We watch each other's houses during vacations. We text when packages are misdelivered, etc. There are always tenants that we don't know in various apartments, but, come snowy weather, I'll likely learn their names when we all gather to help push someone out of a snowbank.
But, the neighborhood sometimes feels very ugly to me. I woke up this morning, threw open the windows to get a breath of fresh air, only to cough my lungs out because the air tasted and smelled of exhaust. When I want to go for a walk, I'm hemmed in by University a half a block to the north, Snelling to the east by about four blocks, the highway two blocks to the south, and Fairview a block and a half to the west. All those streets often so busy as to be unpassable (certainly the highway literally is).
I do feel like the grackle in the first panel. Like, to find beauty, I need to go far.
Today, however, Shawn and I went for a walk and discovered several native gardens that have been planted all up and down our blocks. Moreover, someone has this magical, tiny garden.
Image: Garden with carefully planted chicks and hens and Irish moss.
Image: Tiny rock garden, continued. Moss roses and marigolds.
So, I am looking closely and finding beauty.
Image: Cartoon of a grackle (a brown bodied bird with blue head) realizing that their ugly neighborhood isn't, if you look closely at things.
I really love living in Saint Paul's Midway neighborhood most of the time. We have a really active community.
Our Buy Nothing group is beyond the Pale. I can wax lyrical about how I feel about the folks on that Facebook list, plus it's dead useful. Shawn and I just picked up a folding table that she was excited to find because it will be helpful to have immediately after her knee surgery. It was all bent-up on the bottom shelf, but I managed to spruce it up with two can's worth of spray paint. We may end up passing it back along once she's done with it, but that's the beauty of that group.
I love that our neighborhood has actively adopted "the" possum as our neighborhood symbol. (There are many possums, we just call all of them The Midway Possum.) We track The Midway Possum on Facebook, share photos of her, make art, and write poems and haiku in her honor.
The neighborhood has even organized volunteer garbage pick-up. We are an insanely busy neighborhood, with Snelling and University (and Fairview and highway 94) as part of our neighborhood. We have the Stadium and the light rail so we get lots and lots of people passing through, dropping garbage everywhere. This should be something that the city of St. Paul takes care of, but they don't, and no amount of haranguing will motivate them. So, every first Sunday of the month, a horde of Midway residents don safety vests, pickers, and garbage bags and collect literally hundreds of pounds of garbage.
I know the names of my actual neighbors. The other day when I ran out of garlic powder, I was able to text several of my next door neighbors and get some! We watch each other's houses during vacations. We text when packages are misdelivered, etc. There are always tenants that we don't know in various apartments, but, come snowy weather, I'll likely learn their names when we all gather to help push someone out of a snowbank.
But, the neighborhood sometimes feels very ugly to me. I woke up this morning, threw open the windows to get a breath of fresh air, only to cough my lungs out because the air tasted and smelled of exhaust. When I want to go for a walk, I'm hemmed in by University a half a block to the north, Snelling to the east by about four blocks, the highway two blocks to the south, and Fairview a block and a half to the west. All those streets often so busy as to be unpassable (certainly the highway literally is).
I do feel like the grackle in the first panel. Like, to find beauty, I need to go far.
Today, however, Shawn and I went for a walk and discovered several native gardens that have been planted all up and down our blocks. Moreover, someone has this magical, tiny garden.
Image: Garden with carefully planted chicks and hens and Irish moss.
Image: Tiny rock garden, continued. Moss roses and marigolds.
So, I am looking closely and finding beauty.
