I thought I knew my neighborhood, but it turns out there are streets with well-worn me-grooves in them and streets that don't know my feet at all. And I don't know them, even though they are two blocks away. For whatever reason, they are not in my path to anywhere, haven't been incorporated into a routine walk, and so they sit quietly (or maybe they party), and I have no idea what's going on. I justify this by saying I can't possibly walk by every house on every street every year, but now I wonder. The roads are in frantic upheaval this summer as the water company and the cities and the power company dig for gold on the pretense of providing much-needed maintenance. Jackhammers, hydraulic things, backhoes and pump trucks make raucous noises during business hours. But the good outcome of all of these sidewalk and street closures (aside from putting in the long-delayed curb cuts and fixing the water lines) is that it has forced me to take alternate routes. And because of one alternate route, I found a Little Free Library that is new to me, only four blocks from my house, but may have been there all along. I like it because it and its yard evokes another world. Now it will remind me that there are other worlds all around me, even though I've known this one for more than twenty years.
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