Fancy Cats, Lost Toys

Fancy Cats, Lost Toys

Stories the Neighborhood Tells

Photos by Raven3rivers

Occupied DC #118

Heat from deep in the season is just beginning to rise from the pavement. Clouds flow slowly and the breeze trembles in the leaves.

If summer could smile blue sky like this until fall, how glorious would that be?

Every porch and stoop in my neighborhood has a different story.

But here, there are no fountains painted turquoise and no one has raised a neon bounce house on steroids overhead. Cheap black fencing doesn’t circle most of our parks uptown, though we haven’t escaped the oppressive blue signs that insist everything is S*fe and B***tiful!

And even though there is a resurgence of ICE gestapo, my Hispanic neighbors are still smiling on the street.

The other day a young mother in bicycle gear from our Buy Nothing group stopped by after dropping her kids at school. She pulled a couple of big books by famous Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado from her knapsack for me. A foreign aid worker before the DOGE purges last year, she said she could no longer look at some of the photos because of the misery there. She has another job finally at half the salary but seems to have regained her equilibrium.

Across from the school a few blocks over is a garden full of roses. The dozens of lilies, which just bloomed, will take your breath away.

Conversation with another neighbor always flows so easily; today it landed on memories. I told her how on a trip to Vieux-Quebec, the sight of the funiculaire, a sort of cable car, reminded me of my father belting out an Italian song, “Funiculi, Funicula,” on road trips. My six brothers and I always laughed and protested loudly.

There’s a house two blocks away that mounts an ambitious Halloween pirate display every year. A ship’s prow, two stories high, emerges from a rowhouse and probably a dozen life-size pirates are dressed and posed on the lawn and the neighboring porch. I make sure to visit that one.

A new neighbor, a young woman living with two cats, told me one bright day that she never leaves her home until she has set eyes on both of them, to make sure they are in one piece. I knew she was serious because she described all their hidey holes. The younger kitty pesters the older one, a pretty little floof with a phantom-of-the-opera mask whose feather-duster tail is a favorite target.

One block is the Island of Lost Toys. Last winter, DC had a snowstorm that mutated into two feet or more of “snowcrete” that stubbornly clung to streets, sidewalks and alleys. Digging out a car took hours. I drove by this block back then and spotted a whole front car bumper on the street. Someone just backed out of a parking spot, made an unholy racket prying off the ice-locked bumper, and drove off without it.

Under a big oak today, I spotted a pair of not just any shoes but the kind for pampered feet with a fresh pedicure and ruby red polish. The pair of rainbow maribou mules looked as if they’d been carelessly kicked off in the grass and left behind.

On one hill under some of DC’s deep shade trees, I found a big, chatty tomcat. He sported a white Don Ameche mustache and had to weigh upwards of 25 pounds. He came over to be petted, hissed a time or two, and rolled over for belly rubs. Then he arranged himself neatly, paws together, to be photographed. His people told me all about him with affection from their screened porch.

The coffeehouse across Missouri Ave. is packed this afternoon — though the street is called Military Rd. to the west and Riggs Rd. to the east, just to ensure you never entirely get your bearings. Don’t even ask about the multiple identities of Florida Ave.

A friend and I pull up chairs in a sunny window the width of the shop that is chock-a-block with colorful throw pillows, and catch up on family and other news.

The tea is good, but honestly I like listening to the customers. One day I watched a young, bearded father earnestly teach his four-year-old daughter about Agamemnon, a king from Greek mythology.

Another time, a pair of students quizzed each other on medical diagnoses like hypercholesterolemia. Before that a young woman was learning Greek to study the Bible, her hands flying through the air as if weaving spells.

Outside, spring is nearly over.

End the occupation!