Dear Wigleaf,

The trees on Fourth Street went to make room for the sewers. These days, sewers occupy the better part of our civic mind. We were not always thus. We have deferred and deferred. We haven't had the money, though we've always had the lake and have always been built on a hill emptying into it. Now every road crew is also a sewer crew. As most every entrepreneur is an entrepreneur in alcohol. Now a new park is a green topping for a containment tank. I am a pedestrian as well as a citizen. Two years later I still feel the loss of the trees.

Last month they moved our long-moored, tourist-friendly ship. Rust in the hull, unspecified environmental threats in the sediments below. Slowly, they towed the ship across the bay to the shipyard. Now we have the great empty slip and people who seem to be landscaping around it. I don't miss the ship. I can't comprehend, visually, the difference between the slip empty and the slip full. As if there were nothing to see, as if I had no place there.

But that is the waterfront. Back and forth I go above it, on the tilted sidewalk, along the street with the missing trees.  

Yrs,

Jessica



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Read JR's story.

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