POODLE PLAY

As I walk around the streets close to home, it seems that the old neighborhood doesn’t change much from day to day, and sometimes it’s easy to think it doesn’t even change so very much from year to year.  Certainly some of the neighbors put out the same decorations every Christmas.  I don’t blame them since I, of course, don’t put out any decorations at all.  I mean there are plenty in the house but not outside for passing gawkers/walkers.

One of the things my kind of casual local walking does is make you more observant of small changes.  So, the photograph above was taken yesterday, on Christmas Day, and any fool could tell that things weren’t quite as they’d been in previous years.  For one very obvious thing, it has been rather wet in Hollywood this last week or two, wet enough that your poodle decoration would definitely need some protection from the elements.   I took the photograph above, and knowing that I’d taken a similar photograph a couple of years back, when I got home I did some compare and contrast.

I saw they’d painted the mailbox for one thing (maybe I noticed that because I know my own mailbox needs repainting).  Also they’d got some new and more plentiful Christmas lights.  And some work had been done on the tiny patch of, for want of a better word, garden: goodbye to the agaves, hello to some things in pots that I can’t name.

Also the fine old car (was it a Buick?) that had been sitting in the driveway next door for a good long time, and looked like it was never going to move, has moved - to be replaced by a Mercedes.  Some would say that’s a step in the right direction.  Me, I’m not so sure.