Community muckraking

Neighborhood clean up day. City provides rakes and bags and we do the rest. The sky sunny and overcast, not hot, a slight breeze; a great day for handling mounds of sodden leaves raked from the road verge. There's some trash and some concrete debris but less than in past years; the litterers and dumpers have failed behind.

Out of their houses on Manning, Mt Hope, Canterbury come the crew, some neighbors I know, others new. How long have you been here? Really that long? What about you? That long? Young couples, mothers and daughters, mothers with babies in carriages, ready-to-help kids, Italian people, Jamaican, Haitian, and old guys like me. As we moved from one 'hot spot' to another, the ranks swelled and shrank and swelled again with new folk, so that a full 4 hours of hard work was done and our little island neighborhood made spiffy edge to edge.

There were lots of 'in the old days' stories ('My wife live there before we got married.'), and new ideas for rebranding the area ('Lost Roslindale' or 'The Agricultural District'). There were shocked encounters with snails and centipedes and plump opalescent worms snoozing in the leaf litter. There were reminiscences of hard physical work done earlier and elsewhere. There was a lot of raking and dragging and bending and shoveling over and over again. At the end, my hands, shins, scalp were scratched, my palms were filthy (I hate gloves) and my legs in need of soaping down to get rid of poison ivy juice.

We live close by each other but we're not a close neighborhood, except on these occasions, and then we see who turns up (Why wasn't Jimmy here this year?). It's an unpretentious place, nobody is bossy. Why we all turn ou,t I don't know. Why we were so intent on finishing that even the city workers picking up trash bags pitched in, I don't know. We may not see each other till next year. How it all works is mysterious (though my friend Yori's knocking on doors may be part of the answer), but it does year after year.

I got a fresh white and blue Boston Shines teeshirt (newly-designed; new mayor) out of it, and just in time because last year's is getting discolored because I wear it every day running. Tomorrow I'll be out on the road in my new shirt--Boston pride.

If you've had encounters like any I talk about here (or different ones), I invite you to share.