Neighborhood In Transition

Well. It's somewhere in the 85 degree range, down from the 95 degree range earlier in the day and I think just about every pre-pubescent boy in the neighborhood is in our yard hanging out with my two sons, and they are all armed. Swords. Rubber band guns. Squirt guns. Snorkeling masks (!). Most adults are hanging out in their AC or outdoors while the kids run around like wild animals.

In our neighborhood it's mostly grandparents watching their childrens' children.

We're in what I like to call a "transitional" neighborhood. One of those neighborhoods that's mostly populated by people who have been living there for 30 years...they slowly move out to nursing homes or florida or to their final resting places, and younger families with kids slowly move in.

Our last house was also in a transitional neighborhood. Though further along. In our last neighborhood in our last home you could almost watch the transition taking place.

An ambulance would pull up to a house where a man had been living since the 1940s, and would pull away. Two weeks later a moving van would pull in and an explosion of children would spray out and run into the house as a new, young family moved in. The convection of the neighborhood seemed to happen at an accelerating pace.

I think our new neighborhood is due for such an overturn as well. The folks living here have been living here for over 30 years. Some for more than 60 years. They're retired, living on their pensions and social security. They have old vendettas against one another that I can't understand...old bitter rivalries dating back to when they themselves were raising children in their homes.

But us...we're the young ones moving in, and they treat us well, despite our eccentricities. Everybody seems delighted to have children in the neighborhood again.

I suspect it's going to happen more and more here. We moved into a home left behind by an older woman who had lived here for decades.

Today the neighborhood is older, retired, with few children besides children watched by grandparents. Not the thundering herds of children that inhabited the last neighborhood we lived in.

We are in a neighborhood in transisition.