Destruction, With or Without a Permit

First, the good news on the construction front.  The house at the corner of Wessyngton and North Highland, across Wessyngton from where the apartments used to be, is being renovated rather than demolished and replaced with a completely different house.  As it turns out, they didn't even dismantle the garage - it has new siding, as does the second floor on the back of the house.

Another piece of good news is that the rental house on our street that is currently vacant got a new roof put on it this week.  This strongly suggests that the owner doesn't plan to sell it to anyone who will demolish it and replace it with new construction any time soon.

The new, very large house that was built where Angela's house used to be is no longer yellow. It has now been painted a sort of tan color.

Yesterday morning, when I was walking the dog, I noticed something I'd never noticed before.  This is the sign that is in the yard at the duplex -- I took this picture back in September, when the sign was first placed there.

Note the wording:

A. Stillman doesn't only have permission to remove the trees marked with the orange "X," he or she has permission to destroy them.   That's a pretty strong word.  Yesterday afternoon, when I was walking the dog the next time, Iain came with me and I pointed this wording out to him.  Were they trying to make it completely clear that the trees in  question were going to be killed, reduced to firewood and sawdust, and not relocated to some forest on the outskirts of the city where they would live out their lives, safe from developers?  Permission to "remove" the trees might suggest that.

Let's be completely clear about this.  The trees have been sawed into chunks of wood and are awaiting disposal.  They are definitely not being relocated to a tree sanctuary.  This is the view from Lynsley's deck.  (Incidentally, the structure is the upper left hand corner is the garage of the very large new house that used to be yellow and now is tan.)

Yesterday afternoon Iain and I continued on around the block.  Usually we cut through the parking lot at Morningside Presbyterian back to Wessyngton, but I told him I'd noticed a yellow sign on the house on North Morningside near the church that used to have the front yard completely filled with bamboo, and I wanted to see what it was.  So we walked past the house with dog statues in front of it on to this house, which had the ubiquitous dumpster in the front yard.

I don't know what the story is with this house, but there are good sized trees growing on the roof, suggesting a certain degree of lack of attention to maintenance.

The yellow sign that I'd caught a glimpse of from the street was a Stop Work order.  Apparently there weren't the proper permits for construction or demolition. 

There's a large tree in the front yard, marked with two X's in fluorescent orange. But there is no sign from the arborist in the yard, about a request to remove a tree. And looking at the drawing on the back of this tree, in the same bright orange, I am thinking that the arborist didn't paint those X's.

There was this sign in the yard, in front of the house.  I was amused by it, as it didn't seem likely that the intent was to renovate, restore, or renew, unless by renew one meant "demolish and replace with new construction." But of course I could be wrong.

And I guess they're planning on a new tree, too.

Under Construction on Wessyngton Road

We've been watching with a mixture of curiosity and foreboding the construction going on nearby.  First, they took out all the trees in the backyard.  They did this because the house they are building extends to completely fill what had been the backyard.

This picture (above) was taken last weekend, when they were framing in the basement.  Given that this is what the house looked like on Monday morning when I went to work, imagine my surprise when I came home from a short trip Wednesday afternoon to this:

One floor a day had been added to the house.  This was Thursday:

This has generated a lot of discussion among those of us who live at this end of the street.  We are no longer commenting on how quickly this happened (and it was very quick) but now the conversation is about how astonished we are that a house of this size is being put on a 50 foot wide lot on our street.  

Just to be completely clear, the word that is being used most frequently is "monstrosity."  Our neighbor Scott had the best characterization, that it was a Dunwoody mansion turned sideways.  We will have a clear view from our backyard of second story windows on the other side of Kathy and Steve's house.

Sometime before too long (probably not long at all, given the speed at which this is being built) the construction will be done and we will no longer have construction noise scaring the dogs, debris in the street flattening our tires, trucks blocking the street while people stand around looking at blueprints, and mud tracked from the construction site into the street.  

(In spite of the above "Notice to Comply," I don't think they ever did clean it up but it did eventually rain.  Too bad for the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.)

At some point we may stop being horrified by this behemoth of a house.  Maybe the exterior finishing will be so fabulous that we won't mind that it is at least 4 times as large as the adjacent houses.  Maybe they will plant some trees in front of it and in 30 years it won't be so visible.  Maybe the builder is planning on putting an invisibility cloak over the back three-quarters of the house and we won't even be able to see it.  Or maybe we'll just get used to it.

The thing I am really worried about is what kind of neighbors will end up living in a house like this.  It is not that I think that people who want 6000+  square foot houses are by definition bad neighbors; perhaps they need that much space for their extremely extensive toy soldier collection, or the 23 members of their extended family who live with them.  What troubles me is the thought that our future neighbors would probably prefer to be surrounded by other 6000+ square foot houses, not by the houses that are here, and that they will see the current residents of the street as recalcitrant people who need to get out as soon as possible so the street can be filled with giant houses like theirs, houses that don't have backyards and that are occupied by people like them, as opposed to those of us who actually live here.

I would be very happy to be wrong about this, I really would.  This is a great neighborhood.  There are families with children, there are retired people, and there are young single people, and even some students.  Kids ride their bikes in the street.  People walk their kids to school, chat in the street while walking the dogs, pick up each other's mail when someone's out of town, and really do help each other out when help is needed.  (I don't write about the best examples of helping out, because some things are private -- you'll just have to take my word for it.)  We'd love to have another good neighbor on the street, even if we weren't crazy about their house before we got to know them.  But just like no one asked us to approve the design of the house, we don't get to weigh in on who buys it, either.  So we'll have to take what we get, but we're hoping for the best.

In other news, the orange sign at the duplex has been replaced with a yellow sign, indicating that the tree removal plan has been approved by the city.  Another really big house to follow, I expect.  Stay tuned.

More House(s), Fewer Trees

On my street, there are trees behind the houses.  The green space on our side of the street is a ravine.  Although our lot extends part way up the far side, I've never been back there.  It's dense underbrush and not really passable, with towering oaks overhead.  During the summer, the houses on Lanier Place are completely hidden by vegetation.

With construction going on, we are losing more of the trees that make this greenbelt.  They took out the trees that were behind the house I still think of as Angela's house, and now the house will fill what used to be the back yard.  From Kathy and Steve's backyard, the view over the fence (I am sure the builders will add a fence) will not be of their neighbors' backyard, but of their house, going all the way back to the diminished treeline.

Friday afternoon when I was walking the dog, a man driving a City of Atlanta car posted this sign in front of the duplex:

I talked to him later, when he finished walking around the empty lots where the apartments used to be at Wessyngton and North Highland.  I asked if he was a city arborist, and he said he was. Did the orange sign mean more trees were coming down?  It meant that there was a proposal to remove trees; it had not yet been approved; if and when it was, the yellow sign would replace the orange one.  I gestured to the empty lots where the apartments were.  We're worried about losing more trees here too, I told him.  He said the trees weren't being adequately protected there.  

The next day I walked around and saw what he was talking about.  This tree had been left when the demolition was done, but has been badly damaged, presumably by the equipment that had been used.

Yesterday morning I woke up early and heard for the first time in a while one of the neighborhood barred owls.  It wasn't so close, but it sounded like it was somewhere in the trees behind our house.  A little later in the morning, when I was walking the dog, I heard an owl again, this time on the other side of North Morningside.  Yesterday afternoon, I was out with the dog at dusk and heard it again, but this time it was closer.  It kept calling and seemed to be staying in one place, and as we walked toward home, we were getting closer.  I think it was in the trees behind where Angela's house used to be.

I hate it that we are losing so many of the trees on our street.  At some point, surely it will matter.

This Week in Real Estate

Lots of real estate-type activity on the street.  The house that had been owned by the family that is moving to Japan has sold, as has the house of the couple that is moving to New York.  Another house was just put on the market, so there will probably be new neighbors there, too, before too long.  The duplex had been under contract, but now the "For Sale" sign is back up; I guess the sale didn't go through.

I am sure that if the duplex does eventually sell, it will be knocked down and replaced with something much larger and well outside the budget of the former residents of the duplex.  Of course that's the plan for the apartments at Wessyngton and North Highland, too.  The "For Sale" signs there have been gone there for a long time, and the new signs are about the owners' request to subdivide the property into three lots instead of two.

I don't know that it's readable in my photograph but the meeting is on February 17.  Here's my question -- is the property big enough to build three houses that meet current zoning, or are they going to come back and ask for variances to zoning, since the lots are too small?  Tom and I hope to make it to the meeting next week.  We'll see what happens.

There's a sign at Angela's old house too (I still think of it as "Angela's house" even though she wasn't the last tenant there.)  

This one is a public notice that the trees marked with an "X" have been approved by the city for removal.  The date for public comment is past, and I think was already past by the time I saw the sign.

I figured if they had been asking for public comment it was okay to go onto the property and see what trees were being removed, so over the weekend I went into the backyard to see.  

It was depressing.  All the large trees in the back yard were marked with large orange X's.  Just one of them is in the photo below -- I think there were 5 trees that were marked for removal.  Several of them show, I think, in the photo above of the house; they are the trees that are closest, behind the house.  They are all going to be cut down.

It's not all bad news, though.  This house on Cumberland -- my favorite renovation in the neighborhood -- briefly had a "For Sale by Owner" sign in the front yard.  Yesterday while I was walking the dog I had a chance to ask if it had sold.  Yes, I was told.  Three days on the market, three offers.  

And I don't think they removed any trees.

A Dark and Stormy Night

The weather has oscillated between chilly (although perhaps seasonal) and too warm for the calendar.  Monday was very warm, and that night we had the upstairs windows open and the attic fan on.  Not much sleep that night.  First, it was hot upstairs, and it seemed like every time I went to sleep the weather radio would go off, with a warning that there were severe storms in the area.  I grew up in Oklahoma, in towns that periodically got wiped off the map by tornadoes, so I have great respect for weather; I would listen each time for long enough to make sure that it wasn't a tornado warning for Atlanta, and then hit the button to end the message but leave the radio on.

It was sometime around midnight that there was a really loud crash.  I went downstairs in the dark to make sure things were okay; I didn't see anything wrong, but I didn't look very hard.  Whatever it was, it didn't seem to be inside the house.  It wasn't long after that that I was up again; the power was off, and the alarms on the uninterrupted power supplies on the computers were beeping.  Outside, it was still windy with rain.  Caroline got up too and she turned off the computers and we unplugged other electronics; upstairs, we closed the windows to keep out the rain.  She was texting her friends and got updates from around the area, who had power and who didn't.  (High school kids apparently only sleep in the daytime.)  She looked out into the street, into the storm, and said there were tree branches in the street, but my car looked okay; we saw a driver made his way, then, past the downed branches so it must not be too bad.  Whether the car was okay or not, I wasn't going outside to check; even if the storm wasn't still going on, it wouldn't be safe to go outside in the dark with the possibility of downed powerlines.

I personally have gone over that list from Ready.gov with the Cub Scouts, for what you need to be prepared at home, but in the morning we couldn't find any of the probably 20 flashlights that are somewhere in the house; I couldn't even find - without Tom's help - the matches.  The battery powered lantern - which I did eventually find -  hadn't been recharged after the last camping trip.  So Tom made an early morning trip to Home Depot for flashlights, making his way through the neighborhood in the dark with trees down blocking streets at random.  But before he went to Home Depot, he was standing in the doorway and told me that the large limbs that had fallen from the tulip poplar across the street were on top of my car.

We were still worried about downed power lines so I didn't get out to check the damage until it was light.  That loud crashing sound the night before had almost certainly been the back of my car, exploding.

An early morning phone call to the 24 hour toll-free claim number at State Farm ("There's a tree on my car"), and a vague assurance that I would hear back sometime ("This morning?" "Probably not").  Retrieving stuff from the trunk through the broken back window.  It was back to being cold again, and I had to wear a jacket.  The one thing that had been in the car that mattered - the box of material for updating my overdue book chapter - wasn't damaged by the rain that had gotten in through the broken window over night.

The power came on around midnight the following night, and then went off again.  When I got home from work, I called Georgia Power and the automated voice (with a warm Georgia accent) said they expected to have the power back on that day.  I took the kids out to dinner, and just as we returned, a convoy of Georgia Power and Altec trucks appeared in front of the house.  Tom and I sat on the porch and watched them, working under bright lights on the darkened street, put the power line that had slipped off the insulator on the top of the pole back into place.  I told Tom, those guys, they're heroes.  They moved on up the street, and it wasn't long before we noticed the street lights were back on.  We turned around and looked inside, and the lights were on in our kitchen. 

I found Iain upstairs asleep, with his bedroom light on; the power had come back on after he had gone to bed.  I switched it off, and went to bed.

Suddenly Spring

After all that cold and ice, and now suddenly, it's spring.  Driving the kids to school on Monday, and pointing out to Mimi, our visitor from Germany, the different flowering trees.  The tulip trees bloom first, and then the Bradford pears and the redbuds.  But it was February 28, I told her, and it could still get cold again, and freeze everything back.  I was out of town for a few days, and now the trees are starting to leaf. 

With the loss of the two large dogwood trees that used to be in the backyard, all that's left for hanging the birdfeeders are two large Chinese privets, so that's where we have them.  There's the new squirrel proof feeder with the motor, that does seem to have intimidated the squirrels sufficiently that they just stay away from it, and the finch feeder filled with thistle seed, and the hummingbird feeder that never got brought in for the winter and now needs to be cleaned up and refilled.  Now that I know that privet is an invasive species (thank you, Trees Atlanta), I know we should get rid of it.  I guess we could put the bird feeders on poles, but we haven't.

On President's Day weekend, Caroline and I participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count.  I was a little disappointed that during the half hour that we counted, there was less diversity in our backyard than usual.  That weekend both the robins and the redwing blackbirds were having conventions in Atlanta, and the locals were staying in, I think, kind of like what we did during the Olympics.  That said, we were able to identify most of the birds we saw except for several little brown birds that I assumed were some kind of sparrow but I had no idea which kind.

So later - after we did our count - I got out the binoculars and the bird book and really looked at them.  As it turned out, they weren't all alike.  One of them had a dark spot on the breast and I think was a song sparrow, and the other had a yellow spot by its eye and was I think a white-throated sparrow.

When I got back home yesterday, all the feeders (including the suet feeder on the dining room window) were empty, except for the finch feeder, which was half empty.  Too tired last night to do anything about it, but after I put on coffee this morning it was the first thing I did.  Suet in the suet cage, sunflower seeds in the window feeder and the big feeder on the privet, thistle seed in the finch feeder.  While I was out, I checked on the trees.  There is now the first sign of green on the apple tree I planted last year, and there also are signs of life from the dogwood tree we planted on Mother's Day. But only two of the four blueberry bushes seem to have survived.

Back inside, with a cup of coffee, on a grey damp March morning.  The cardinals are back, and the downy woodpecker that comes to the suet feeder has already been by.  It makes a racket, when the metal cage knocks into the dining room window.  And if you look, there are the little brown birds hopping on the ground.

Mother's Day

On the shuttle back to the airport parking lot the other day, a man got on with a box with a handle like travellers from Maine use to carry lobsters, but this one said "Caramel Apples."  Someone said a caramel apple would hit the spot on the way back to the car, and someone else asked if he'd brought enough for everyone.  He didn't say anything; he had earbuds in his ears, and I think he missed the whole exchange. 

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate came back from somewhere with a caramel apple for me.  After the apple was eaten, I planted one of the seeds from it in a cutoff milk carton and put it in the window of my dormitory room.  The seed did germinate and I think for the rest of the year I had it in my dorm room, a bit of green in a room on the sixth floor of a twelve-story building with windows that didn't open.

At some point I took it home with me, to my parents' house, and my dad planted it in the alley.  The standing joke of course was that if it did ever make apples, we'd have an awful time keeping the insects off the caramel.  It did make a few apples over the years but they weren't very good and they didn't have caramel on them. 

The tree eventually died; by the time I sold the house, it was gone.

Last winter, a neighborhood group raising money for the new park at Highland and St. Charles had a plant sale, and I bought a Granny Smith apple tree, along with some blueberry bushes and strawberries.  My only prior experience with apple trees was not that successful (see above), and I didn't get off to too good a start with the new one, leaving the bareroot tree out of the ground for a while before I got it planted.  But I did get it in the ground eventually, and it made leaves in the spring, grew a little in the summer, and dropped the leaves in the fall.  It's 3 or 4 feet tall and years away from making apples, caramel or not.  But as the winter days drag on, something to look forward to, waiting for the leaves to emerge on the little tree, seeing it grow.  Someday, if all goes well, there will be apples; planting trees definitely requires a longterm view.

Then last year on Mother's Day, we were all working in the backyard, getting kudzu off the back fence and doing some general clean up.  There used to be two dogwood trees in the backyard, but they both died - blight or drought or old age or some combination of the above, I guess.  At some point that afternoon I told Tom I knew what I wanted for Mother's Day, that I wanted a dogwood tree.  (I could have told my children this, given that they were technically the ones responsible, but going straight to Tom was more efficient.)  So he went to Pike's and got one, and the kids dug a hole and we planted it, near where the other dogwood trees had been, on the other side of the yard from the apple tree.

Sarah said it should be our Mother's Day tradition, to take a picture of the dogwood tree every year.  I thought that was a great idea but of course we didn't get around to doing it.  Maybe this year.

Spring, finally

It was such a long winter; it didn't seem like it would ever end. In so many recent years, the trees began blooming in February, the azaleas in March, and by April, it seemed to be summer. Not this year, though. The redbuds and tulip trees were first, maybe two weeks ago, followed by the cherry trees and Bradford pears. Last Sunday, walking to church, I noticed that the dogwood blossums were just starting to emerge but the trees - Bradford pears and everything else - really didn't have leaves. By Monday, they did. It was quite amazing, how suddenly everything started to be green. Even our ginkgo tree - which always seems to be the last tree on the block to break into leaf - is starting to get leaves.

At the sale a couple of weeks ago, I bought an apple tree from the Virginia Highlands group that is raising money to build a new park at Highland and St. Charles. It was bare root, and I didn't have time to plant it that day, so I wrapped the roots in a wet towel and left it on the driveway. It was cool and wet that day, so it seemed like it would probably be okay til I could get it in the ground, assuming it wasn't too long.

Iain and I planted it the next day. We dug a hole-that-seemed-to-be-bigger-than-it-needed-to-be in the back yard and mixed in some compost from the old site of the compost bin. (The new site has yet to yield compost, as it has been too cold for that particular magic to happen. Mostly we have a large quantity of garbage and paper, waiting for the weather to warm up.) We got the tree in the ground, and then we waited.

We may have to wait a couple years for apples, but like almost all the other trees, this is the week that our little apple tree broke alive with green leaves. Every day when I get home from work I go outside and look for new evidence of life, and there is a little more to see.

There also are stirrings on other fronts, after a long cold winter. Some of the vacant retail space in the neighborhood and beyond is starting to get occupied, store front by store front. The opening of a new discount furniture store at the site of the old Home Depot on Sidney Marcus completely filled the parking lot, and there's also a new furniture store at the former site of the pet supply store on Piedmont in the strip mall that was emptied Before the Crash to make way for something that to date has not been built.

Of course, one has to wonder how long it will take to absorb all the apartments and condos that Someone thought needed to be built in town. I drive by them and I see the buildings, mostly empty but with a few units looking occupied. (I was on my way to pick up Sarah at school and she called and asked where I was. Not far, I said, driving by the empty apartments on Piedmont. She asked, which ones?) Lights on timers and rented furniture, just so the place won't look so dismal, or are there really a few people living in these mostly empty buildings? What would it be like, living in a place meant for high density with no one there?

I have been slowly savoring Jane Jacobs' classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She makes a powerful case for it being lots of people that make a city feel safe. At night, if there are people on the sidewalk and lots of coming and going from bars and theaters and restaurants and people just getting off the evening shift or on their way to the night shift, the neighborhood will feel safe, but the same street, without the people, won't. Green space for the most part does not contribute to safety because at night it becomes a sort of urban no fly zone that doesn't attract any people; there's no reason to be there, and and because of that, it doesn't feel safe. For an urban environment to feel safe, you need lots of people coming and going into the night - and you don't have that without high density and diversity of use. Diversity of use is facilitated by having diversity of building stock - old buildings with interesting spaces can provide inexpensive commercial space for galleries and small restaurants and interesting little shops. If there are too many new buildings, rents are too high for anything interesting and there is no reason for people to be there who don't have to be.

So we now have all these - mostly empty - work/live developments, with really boring-looking retail space (a lot of which is empty) and all those empty apartments and condos. I am so glad to see signs of life in the economy - like the leaves on the trees outside, it is so welcome after a really long winter - but you just have to wonder what's going to happen to all these developments. It wouldn't be so bad, having these large, boring structures around if they were actually full of people who might provide the population density to support something interesting, but they aren't. Without people?

At least if they were green space they would soak up some CO2.

What I Thought I Knew

We have been talking about trees at our house - planting them, and talking other people into planting them. Tom had wanted to invite someone from Trees Atlanta or the Georgia Urban Forest Council to come to our last block party but we never got around to doing it. Last year I didn't go to the Trees Atlanta workshop on how to plan a neighborhood tree-planting event because it was during the Great Atlanta Gasoline Shortage, but maybe Tom or I can make it to the one at the end of the month.

I notice the trees mostly when I'm walking, and I thought I had noticed over the years most of what there was to notice about the trees on the street. The tall pines, the tulip poplars, the mulberry trees, the maples (Japanese and otherwise), and of course the oak trees - the tall, towering oaks that shade the yards and houses and asphalt of our street better than another other trees on the block. We've been gradually losing the oak trees - they are old, and city living is hard on trees, with heat and pavement and drought. We lost one in our yard, years ago, and the huge, wonderful oak tree in Angela's yard was removed a while ago. Someone once told me (in reference to another wonderful oak tree in the neighborhood) that you can't put a price on a tree like that, but it's very valuable.

I thought I knew the trees on our street - I walk by them with the dog or the kids, or on my way to the Farmers Market on Saturday morning. I walk by them all the time and I thought I knew Everything that was Important to Know. I had thought about putting together a guide to the trees of Wessyngton Road, or a website, or something - when you define the boundaries to just our street, you think you can know everything that matters. And I don't just walk by - I do look, and I thought I saw.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed for the first time a small oak tree a few feet from the curb (I say small - small compared to the full size ones. This tree is taller than I am.) I think it is a water oak. I told Tom that Angela had planted a tree, and for the next week or so fretted that the dry hot weather was bad for a newly planted tree.

I finally saw Angela and she said no, that it had been there for a long time, that she had just cleared out the rest of the bed so now the tree was there by itself.

We think we know the places and people that we see all the time, but maybe we don't know them as well as we think we do. It's easy to assume that we know things that in fact we don't.

It's been raining since yesterday evening. The rain will be good for the trees. But as far as the human part of the urban ecosystem is concerned, we can't rely on the weather - we have to attend to that ourselves.

The Holiday Report

With work and the holidays, I have not had any time for the last month or so – so no updates. Not that we aren’t here, and not that things haven’t been happening. So here is a partial summary of what’s been going on for the last month or so.

The Women of Wessyngton Road met at Lynsley’s and then walked up to Caramba Café for the traditional celebration of the Winter Solstice (that would be drinking Margaritas).

Another house on Wessyngton Road has been leveled, next to the Large House that is Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses (LHADAH) that has been completed and on the market for the last several months. They had had a notice up that one or more trees were going to be removed, and sometime before Christmas a huge bile of magnolia branches appeared at the curb. Some were salvaged by neighbors, no doubt for holiday decorations - I would have done so myself if I were organized enough. Now, if another LHADAH is built on this lot, then there will be three of them in a row - this one, the one that is already finished, and the one that is still under construction. Does that mean that technically the one in the middle will no longer be an LHADAH?

Christmas morning started with cooking, then present-opening at Kathy and Steve's with Angela, and then later in the morning at our house. Tom got me a radar gun, which is a totally fabulous Christmas present. We went out later in the day looking for moving cars to point it out but it being Christmas Day, there weren't many of them. So we went to Haygood with a load of corrogated cardboard for recycling and took the gun with us. A little kid with a new bike was already in the parking lot there. I did get to clock a couple of cars on East Rock Springs, no doubt to the puzzlement of a couple of drivers who wondered about the crazy woman standing on the curb with the hairdryer. But they did slow down.

We ended up with more people for Christmas dinner than for Thanksgiving. Fred made it for Christmas dinner, as did Angela's former mother-in-law and a friend of Angela's, as well as Angela herself. Fewer leftovers than at Thanksgiving, as I had a better idea of how much 8 or 9 or 10 people would actually eat. We did have gingerbread people, who had what Caroline described as "scary" chocolate-chip eyes.

We went the Washington, D.C., the week after Christmas, and while we were gone one of the rats made a break for it. This would be one of Sarah's pet rats that lives in the cage in an upstairs bathroom, not an unwelcome visiting-from-outdoors kind of rat. This particular rat had escaped once before and had several exciting days living behind the washing machine before being recaptured and returned to the cage. There were many sightings over the several days following our return home - it would emerge from the space between the washing machine and the dryer, only to retreat if we made a move for it - but eventually we were able to recapture it when we found it on top of the cage, presumably updating its former cage mates about life on the run. (That's often how fugitives are caught - they just can't stay away from family and friends.)

During the month of December, a fair amount of effort was expended to make Christmas cards. Several years ago I got a silkscreen kit for Christmas that has since been used to make several different kinds of T-shirts but we never had tried the photoemulsion technique. So Tom worked on that - we did manage to get a usable screen for the drawing for the front (two different designs, one from each daughter) but the screen for the printing inside didn't come out as well, despite a couple of efforts. So we have blank cards. I did print them, but they are still sitting in a pile on the dining room table (which, by the way, still has the extra leaves we put in it for Christmas dinner). My rule is if you get the cards out by Martin Luther King's birthday, they aren't really late. But that would be this weekend, so I guess I need to get started.

At Home (Wessyngton & North Highland)

There are some apartments at the corner of Wessyngton and North Highland that have been the focus of some neighborhood controversy. My understanding is that the owner has been trying to sell the property for new house construction, but wanted permission for three houses to be built there instead of only two. Given that any new houses built will almost certainly be Large Houses that are Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses (LHADAHs), this is not a prospect about which I am enthusiastic. I don't know many of the people who live in the apartments, but the ones I do know are great neighbors and I would miss them if they moved.

Tom and I were discussing this the other evening when we were out walking the dog. He said that the owner had finally gotten permission to have the apartments replaced with three houses instead of two. I said I hoped that didn't happen, and given the current housing market, if the owner had paying tenants, he might be better off hanging on to the apartments. There are two LHADAHs on the street already - one of which has been on the market for months, and the other still under construction - and that seems to me like it might be enough.

Several years ago Trees Atlanta had a Saturday tree planting event in Morningside. The Trees Atlanta planted elms along the curb on the Wessyngton Road side of the apartments, and crepe myrtles along the North Highland side. One of the elms got dug up by a dog the following summer. We replanted it and ferried some gallon jugs of water to the end of street but to no avail. At least one of the crepe myrtles has been taken out by a northbound car that missed the curve on Highland.

For at least the last two years, the elm trees - which were drastically pruned a couple of years ago, and are still not very tall - have provided seasonal residence for birds. There have been birds' nests in two of them, which amazes me. In spite of drought and ongoing tree removal (thank you, City of Atlanta) our neighborhood is still home to wonderful, massive, towering oak trees. Surely there are safer and more secure places to raise a family than in these trees that are not much taller than I am, planted between sidewalk and curb, where meddlesome humans could peer right into one's nest! Perhaps these particular birds are of scared of heights, or paralyzed by fear that their offspring will take a tumble out of the nest. It seems inexplicable to me.

Then over the weekend - probably during one of our several trips back and forth to the movie store - I noticed that there also was a bird's nest in the crepe myrtles. It was meticulously constructed of pine straw (and by an animal that not only doesn't have opposable thumbs, but doesn't have hands). What a marvel.

If we end up with three more LHADAHs on our street, will they leave the little elm trees and the crepe myrtles in place, or will they remove them?

The Trees of Wessyngton Road

My understanding of neighborhood history is that our street, Wessyngton Road, was a late addition to Morningside. Much of the neighborhood dates to the 1920s, but not Wessyngton Road – our street was built around 1950, and that’s when the older homes on the street were built. There’s been some newer construction too, and of course now some of the 1950s houses are being purchased, torn down, and replaced with Large Houses that are Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses (LHADAHs).

I am not sure when the oak trees – the tall, massive oaks that still stand in a few places on our street – were planted, but they are old, and many of them are at the end of their life. They might have died anyway, but the unfriendly urban environment and drought are definitely taking their toll. One fell over, blocking the street, a couple of months ago; others have been removed to make way for LHADAHs. There briefly was a stop work order, over tree issues, at one of the LHADAHs up the street, but they ended up removing the trees and continuing the construction. Now there’s an orange sign in front of another house, announcing that trees are going to be removed – presumably to allow another LHADAH to be built.

When I bought this house, there was one oak tree in the front yard, and a stump where another one had been cut down by the former owner. It was 13 or 14 years ago that one day half the leaves on the remaining one just turned brown. The tree was dying and the only question was would we get it taken down before it fell over.

Tom wanted to replace it with a gingko, and we went to a large tree farm and picked one out. This was when Sarah was a baby, and I remember that Tom had her in a backpack – it was there that she said her first word, or at least the first one we understood (“duck” – the noun, as opposed to the verb). Tom wanted a gingko because an arborist had recommended it, as a tree that could stand the tough life in the city. It was supposed to be a male tree, since female gingkos make fruit (“the fruit smells like cat vomit,” Tom told me helpfully).

I guess determining the gender of gingko trees is an inexact art, because a few years later our tree started making fruit (surprise!) but it really doesn’t smell like cat vomit; the only real problem is that we have to continually clear out the small gingko trees from underneath, or otherwise our front yard will become a gingko forest. It is now a tall tree, as tall as our house, and in the fall the leaves turn bright yellow. But it doesn’t make shade the way the old oak tree did; I wish we still had an oak tree that would shade the house and the asphalt and help keep things cooler in the summer.

Some of the houses on Wessyngton have no trees at all. The LHADAH that is on the market now – the one that they are asking $1.3 million for – has two small maple trees in the tiny front yard. They may grow to be beautiful trees, and provide wonderful scarlet color in the fall, but they will never shade the street. They took trees out to build the LHADAH next to it, and on the other side is that orange sign.

When we were walking the dog this morning, Tom said we need more trees on our street. A few weeks ago, Trees Atlanta hosted a workshop to teach people how to plan a neighborhood tree planting event; I would have liked to have gone, but that was the weekend of the Great Atlanta Gasoline Shortage, and I didn't go *anywhere.* Maybe next year.