Imagine's Journal

  I saw an image of a buddy’s front yard the other day. This isn’t a neighbor, so the front yard was unfamiliar. It looked rather like some neighborhoods in Boston tend to look. The houses were so close together that they may have even shared a wall and the yards were all in the back. Steps lead straight to the street. Streets are lined on both sides with vehicles. I think I might have a mild form of claustrophobia. I mean, the image that ran thusly; steps, street, car, car, car, building on the other side of the street – made me feel anxious. Same day that that I saw that image, I had been skiing at the park across the street from my neighborhood. To get there, I went through the neighborhood with my skis on my shoulder, walking past a few ten and twelve acre fields covered in snow. I snapped the bindings in place to ski the woods from my street through to a larger park (the Village neighborhood to County Farm Park via Redbud Park trail). Tall, tall trees made that rushing sound of wind in the bare branches. Overhead, a hawk was circling. I expect that the hawk was hoping to get lucky should I kick up anything small and mammalian. I could hear the brook rushing before I got to it and I’m not so good at hearing. All the precipitation has caused it to be in spate, although not as high and fast as it will be in just a few short weeks. The overall effect was that of space and openness, though. Or at least more so than I had been giving it credit for. Without anything to compare it to, I had considered my little ‘hood and the adjoining park system to be too ‘public’ and way too domesticated. Key thing here is ‘with nothing to compare it to’. Or worse, I was comparing it to rural Tennessee where the privacy and wilderness is almost absolute. It was in Tennessee that the coyotes would serenade (read terrorize) the domestic pets nightly.  My front yard was part of a deer trail to the creek and once a wild turkey walked right onto the lawn. In that context, Ann Arbor is too crowded, too public and way too domesticated. But then. That depends on what you compare it to, and on individual tolerances. Funny what you forget and what you remember.  When I first came to Ann Arbor, I had considerable choice about where I wanted to live. Okay, I did *not* have a choice weather or not to live in any of the gigundous McMansions (not that I would want one) hereabouts, but other than that. Interestingly, I chose the Village. It *did* feel a bit constrained and managed compared to the relative wilderness that I was coming from, but not nearly so much as most of the other neighborhoods in the city which use space less wisely and have much less by way of visual vista.

  Thinking about it, I realize that I’d actually seen other images of small bits of the same pal’s neighborhood previously and it had all looked very attractive. I guess new things attract me. Shiny. That and any taste of the exotic or a whiff of adventure is appealing.  It’s just funny what you forget and what you remember – and sometimes when a memory hits just the right spot, I think I may have a touch of claustrophobia.