Where I Live

I love where I live. It's a place on the edge of a 759-acre urban park, populated with deer, squirrels, mink, muskrat, owls, hawks, mice, voles, racoons, fox, coyote, Dustin Hoffman (well, for one day this summer Dustin Hoffman was in the garden), and dozens and dozens of birds species, including wild turkeys (which I know because they came one day last winter to check out the ground beneath my bird feeder).

The mailing address for the apartment where I live is one of those vanity addresses. If you live here, you can say ""I live on Theodore Wirth Parkway", which will actually impress only if you try to sound like Margaret Dumont while doing so, and even then people will only be impressed because you can sound like Margaret Dumont.

The building where I live was build on a piece of land that used to be low and wet. They filled in that land and put a big heavy building on it. Until last year, every time we got a heavy rain, the basement would flood, and the residents would move our cars around like a musical chairs game, with the last one left in a dry spot in the garage being the winner, the rest of us out in the parking lot, soaking wet.

The views out of the windows of our third floor apartment grab my heart and squeeze hard, the way someone in love with you hugs you passionately without breaking you.