Morningside's Best

Morningside is an old neighborhood, dating back to the 1920s if not before, but Wessyngton Road is much newer - connecting North Highland and Cumberland Road, it is straight and much wider than other Morningside streets that are not major thoroughfares. The official descriptions of the property on this street calls this the F.P. Smith Estate subdivision. I don't know who F.P. Smith was, but I am assuming that sometime after World War II the property was sold for development and you can't develop it without a street - so Wessyngton Road was built, and the houses started to appear. The lots are only 50 feet wide and the older houses on the street are (by current standards) small ranch houses nearly devoid of the architectural charm of the older Morningside neighborhoods. (We also have no sidewalks on our street, except along the apartments, at the corner of Wessyngton and Highland, and in front of two of the newly built houses across from the church. I assume that this is because the street was built in the Era of the Automobile.)

Our house was built in 1950. When I bought it in the late 1980s, it had a funny cupola sort of thing on the roof that accommodated an attic fan. The fan was nice, but (along with many of the other houses on street) it didn't look anything like the classic Morningside houses. That's the reason I could afford it at the time - I couldn't believe I could find a house in this neighborhood that I could afford, and of course it was because this wasn't one of those Morningside streets with the big old houses.

We put a second floor on our house in 1998 which not only meant we did not have to give away a couple of our three children, but also that the house looked more like it belonged in the neighborhood than it had previously. (Kudos to Ben Dooley, the architect, who did the magic in design, and Fernando Reyes, who at that time lived across the street, who was our builder.)

Iain and I were walking the dog the other evening and I picked up a flyer for a house on the street that is for sale. The flyer is advertising an "adorable home on one of Morningside's best streets." I was stunned by this. Not the "adorable home" part - it may well be extremely adorable - but the "one of Morningside's best streets" part. Presumably this was written by a real estate agent who actually knows something about Atlanta real estate, and I don't know who in their right mind would characterize Wessyngton Road as "one of Morningside's best streets" from the real estate point of view (unless of course they are thinking "buy a relatively affordable 1950s ranch house and knock it down and build a Large House that is Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses," but that is too depressing to contemplate.)

There are plenty of wonderful things about our location - proximity to both Highland Walk and Virginia-Highlands commercial areas, so we can walk to both Alon's and San Francisco Coffee, and we are in the district of Morningside Elementary School, a public school with high test scores, even though it is chronically infested with head lice - but plenty of other streets in Morningside can say the same thing, and might not be wide enough that the cars cutting through assume the speed limit must be 50 mph. (Our neighbor Tim tried to get a speed bump but no luck. Tom and Dan had proposed pot holes to slow the cars down. Really big ones. You get the picture.) Little ranch houses, no sidewalks, and a real estate agent says this is "one of Morningside's best streets"?

But of course, the real estate agent is right - it's just that what makes Wessyngton one of Morningside's best streets is not captured in any statistic that anyone can look up in a table somewhere. There is a tradition here - I am not sure what to call it, but for lack of a better term I will call in neighborliness - that one doesn't expect to find in a city. Years ago, people who don't live here any more hosted parties and invited me, and I got to know people I otherwise might not have met. The social committee baton has been passed, and now there are several of us who pick the dates and send the emails, but we didn't start it - it was here already. Morningside Presbyterian Church has been a wonderful neighbor and has let us hold block parties in their parking lot, but there are also baby showers and going away parties. If you met someone at a block party, you might stop and talk when you're out walking the dog, and then, if you see someone you don't know carrying a flatscreen TV out of their house, you might call 911. There's the informal network of flat tire repair, pest control, and plumbing help. The race car bed went from one side of the street to the other and back, from Max to Iain to Benjamin.

So that's the story. Even with the speeding cars barrelling down the hill toward Cumberland Road and no sidewalks, it is a great street.

But it's not the houses, it's the people in them.

Fireworks!

Sometime before July 4th, Caroline went with her friend Sally on an expedition to Alabama to buy fireworks. She came back and said that there had been a raffle while she was there and she had won $100 worth of fireworks. Tom said, what was second prize - $200 worth? She did survive the 4th without injury.

One day last week I was driving home from work and ended up behind a long line of cars on Lenox Road, stopped for a train. In front of me was a white Volvo station wagon (you know, the kind of car people drive who really care a lot about safety) with Dekalb County plates. There were three people in the car. Then I see the passenger in the front seat stick an arm out the window, and he was holding something bright, like it was on fire. It was a sparkler.

At the intersection of Johnson Road and East Rock Springs, I ended up alongside the car at a red light. There were three boys in it - they looked like high school kids. I thought about rolling down the window and ask if they had anything more incendiary that sparklers they were thinking about lighting in the car, but I didn't.

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.

Block Party

We were talking back in March that it might be time for a Social Event, but we never got around to organizing it. (We were thinking comfort food potluck - something appropriate for the general mood of the country.) By the time March was over, it was time to start thinking about a block party.

For the last several years, we've had a block party in August or September. Lynsley, Kathy, and I come up with a date and Lynsley gets permission from the church for us to use their parking lot. I send out some emails, put it on the web site, and print up flyers. Usually Kathy distributes them, but this year Kathy was gone, and Sally did it - she made sure she went all the way from Cumberland to Highland, and even got the houses around the corners. A few reminder emails go out to everyone we have an email address for, and we ask everyone who gets the emails to invite their neighbors if they are not on the "To:" line - if they aren't there, it's because we don't have an email address for them, not because they aren't invited.

So late afternoon several of us head to the church parking lot with card tables and start setting up. A charcoal grill for folks who want to cook something. Tables for food to share. Lynsley brings trash and recycling containers from across the street. Name tags and a sign up sheet for the neighborhood directory. Bubbles and sidewalk chalk for the kids.

Then people start to come. Food. Lawn chairs. Meet some new people. How long have you lived here? A few neighbors bring friends; Sabine's parents are visiting from Germany. Neighbors who are moving but want to be kept on the distribution list, one family that doesn't live here yet but will when construction is done on their house. Someone says we should do this more often. Talking with people we know and people we just met. How old are your children? Which one is yours? Little kids blow bubbles. Big kids play street artist with the sidewalk chalk. When is the baby due? Lots of food.

It was about dark before the music started. We have wonderfully talented musicians on our street (resident or honorary - not everyone who played actually lives here). What a great treat, to sit in a lawn chair on a summer evening and listen to music.

It gets late. Eventually the lawn chairs get folded up and taken home one by one. The mostly empty bowls and platters are retrieved, the bottles go into recycling. When it's done, late that night, all that's left is the chalk drawing on the asphalt.

On Wessyngton Road, we've been doing this for several years, and before that, there were other events that were great fun. There was the Christmas decoration tour, and Margaret made those charming penguin appetizers out of olives stuffed with cream cheese, with little carrot beaks (they were almost too cute to eat). There have been pot luck dinners and baby showers. There have been going away parties. I remember two Halloween parties - one in Amy's garage and one hosted by Todd and Charlotte.

Speaking of Halloween - if we can throw a great block party on Wessyngton Road, we ought to be able to do something for Halloween. We've got a couple of months to get organized. Stay tuned.

Update from Wessyngton Road

Too busy to blog for the last couple of months - many posts written in my head (usually while walking the dog around the neighborhood, watching houses go up, silt in the rainwater in the gutter, or while getting updates about neighborhood Pest Control Issues) but none made it to keyboard - at least, not until now.

There is a new group that's been formed to support Morningside parks - the Morningside Parks Commission, Inc. There's a website and a Yahoo group, and the first project they have taken on is a toddler play area at Sidney Marcus Park. You may recall that the sandbox was closed last fall, eliminating a potential neighborhood source for toxoplasmosis exposure. The new group, headed by Natasha Moffitt and Scott Lenhart, is fundraising for a new toddler play area. Presumably the new play area will be Improved and Toxoplasmosis-Free. If you have a toddler, or used to have a toddler, or were ever a toddler yourself, please consider contributing; $75 gets you your very own engraved brick. According to the website, contributions are tax deductible.

Another neighborhood issue that needs attention is a familiar one, if you have read this blog before - that would be Rats. The news from the street is that The Rats are Back. Perhaps the recent rains have flooded them out of their winter quarters in someone's basement, or perhaps falling housing prices have made our street More Affordable - I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, they are back.

Angela had one in a cupboard in her house last week; it was captured and released in a Havahart trap. (Only Angela would do that. Most of us do not really have a heart when in comes to rats in our cupboards.) Then yesterday Tom saw it, or one of its friends or relatives, on our front porch in broad daylight. (Perhaps they prefer househunting by day.) So Tom put out the special, highly toxic Rat Treats in the special dispensers from Do It Yourself Pest Control. This worked amazingly well last time, and then the rats were invading our kitchen regularly. Hopefully this will keep them out of the house altogether.

But, like many other things, Rat Control is a Shared Responsibility. We all need to do our part. So our early summer block party is coming up at the end of the month; flyers should be going out soon, if they haven't already. Tom had wanted to have Trees Atlanta there or someone from the Georgia Urban Forestry Council to tell us why we should all plant trees. Trees are all well and good, but if the neighborhood is being overrun by Rats that seems to me to be a little more urgent. So maybe we should ask the guys from Do It Yourself Pest Control to come set up an exhibit.

Then, the Snow

The snow started this morning while we were at church. It was coming down in golfball-sized clumps of wet snowflakes, covering cars and grass, sticking to trees, but mostly melting on the streets. It doesn't snow much in Atlanta, so there were a succession of kids with sleds, makeshift and otherwise, going down the hills in front of Morningside Presbyterian. Iain went sledding first by himself, then played with the boys next door, and then went sledding again before finally coming inside.

I took the dog for a walk around the block while the snow was still falling heavily. Bullwinkle is a black Laborador retriever, with big feet with webbed toes. He didn't mind walking in the slush along the curb, and the large falling snow flakes made him sort of look like the opposite of a Dalmatian. The family at the corner of Cumberland and North Morningside made a great snowman. The mother told me that her children didn't know how to make a snowman, that they were leaving too much of this to her to do. I told her that was because her children lived in Atlanta, and if she wanted them to know how to make snowmen, she needed to move to Michigan. But they made a great snowman, with a scarf and a hat, a carrot nose, and figs for eyes.


It's now late afternoon and the snow is still falling, but it is not as heavy as it was earlier. The sky is gray and the gutters are full of slush and cold water. It it gets cold tonight, the city will be covered in ice tomorrow. A Sunday afternoon with snow means kids and sleds and snowmen; a Monday morning with ice is another mattter entirely. About once an hour this afternoon there has been the sound of thunder. Snow, and thunder. It's unsettling.

Iain is reading his book now, in front of the fire. I guess it is time for me to think about what we have in the house for dinner.

After the Rain

It rained yesterday - the kind of slow, soaking rain that I expect to have in Atlanta during the winter. I drove the girls to Athens yesterday morning and was in rain for entire drive there and back. It stopped around the time I got back, and I asked Iain if he wanted to try out the radar gun. He had wanted to use it Thursday night, but it was Family Science Night at Morningside Elementary, and we didn't have time.

So we got the dog and the radar gun and walked up to East Rock Springs. Iain positioned himself in line with the curbside maple trees along the edge of the Haygood parking lot, across from Sunken Garden Park, next to one of those "Slow Down" signs that PEDS has distributed around the neighborhood. He probably spent half an hour, checking the speed of cars heading towards Morningside Elementary School. The speed limit is 25 miles per hour, and there were only a few cars going that slowly - Iain said that a few drivers did wave at him, and that they generally speaking were the ones who were close to the speed limit. There were three vehicles that were going 45 or 46 miles per hour, and lots of them in between that and the speed limit.

For a few minutes I sat on the stone wall alongside the sidewalk, watching, but Bullwinkle didn't want to stay in one place, so we walked around the parking lot instead. There were lots of earthworms stretched out on the asphalt - some were dead, but most were simply in the wrong place, having come up from the drenched ground to avoid drowning, and now were stranded on a parking lot where they would be stepped on or worse.

Thursday night at Family Science Night, Iain and I had attended a session on worms, where a guy from the Hike Inn at Amicalola Falls State Park talked about using worms to get rid of vegetable waste and paper. At the Hike Inn, they have massive vats of worms that they feed table scraps, paper, and even cotton fabric to, and the worms turn it into fertilizer. Of course I knew that worms were an important part of the ecosystem, but I had never thought of them being used for commercial-scale composting. The worms in our gardens do the same kind of magic without us even noticing.

So, I picked a couple of them up and moved them to the stretch of ground between the parking lot and the driveway to the Grizzard House - a strip of ground that is thick with fallen leaves and pine straw, where hopefully earthworms would have the sense to stay and not go wandering around the parking lot. Then there were a few more, and a few more, and then I was finding them everywhere I looked - sometimes I have 4 or 5 or 6 at a time, wriggling in the palm of my hand. I must have moved 50 or 60 of them off the asphalt, while Iain was at the curb with the radar detector.

As we were leaving, he told me that I was the kind of person who would rescue earthworms. I suppose one could hear worse from one's child.