Snow on the Wasteland

I spent most of yesterday working in a suburban library. (It's not the closest one or the largest one - I go there because it's under-utilized, and I can always find a table to myself.)

This library is in a new housing development. Hundreds of townhouses, the proverbial "little boxes made of ticky tacky." I worked until closing, long after sunset. As I left, I saw the Christmas lights that the townhouse builder had put up in the tiny park in a futile attempt to make the place look festive.

Across the street are a few acres of land not yet bulldozed for housing. The trees on that land - now bare of leaves - had snow plastered to their trunks and branches on the windward side.

Those snow-covered trees on wasteland are far more beautiful than anything that builder had managed to achieve. Or ever will.

Sometimes Things Actually Get Better

It's too nice out to spend all day in my home office...so I took my laptop to the library. (I like to live dangerously.) I was still inside, but at least I had a nice window, and thousands of books near at hand.

Unfortunately, what the library doesn't have is food. So, when I got hungry, I decamped to a nearby Panera Bread, which offers free wi-fi. And I still have a window, although this one opens out onto a parking lot.

This Panera Bread is in an old shopping center that was upgraded a few years ago. When I was a kid, this parking lot was a barren, potholed, trash-strewn wasteland. My High School Ecology Club inherited a recycling center in this parking lot, so I spent some time here, separating recyclables. Eventually, with people dumping non-recyclable trash here, the site grew beyond what High School kids could handle, and the owner just carted everything away.

But, since the renovation, there are flowers here. There are shrubs and plantings in the medial strips. There aren't any potholes, and the trash is picked up. There's no need for a recycling center, because the local townships all have recycling programs. Sometimes things actually do get better....