This is what I see when I look to the east from my front yard. The park is actually a couple of football fields in length, but I zoomed in so you could see what we all love most: the dock. It used to jut out to the left, but the angle was all wrong. The least little storm would rip the boards up. Our neighborhood association had it repaired professionally, and we had several repair-it-yourself parties over the years, but invariably as soon as the dock was repaired we would get a tropical storm or a hurricane, and it would be unusable again. This time they laid the boards down lengthwise and left off that crazy angle, and it survived hurricane Rita. The Little Angel and I love to sit here and swing and sing silly songs and talk about all sorts of things. The big open area across the street is the park. There is always a breeze off the water, so it is cool and mosquito-free.

This is the view to the west. Our little neighborhood is only two streets wide and we get very little through traffic. Unless it's school hours, there is always a group of kids playing street hockey or baseball or jumping ramps with their skateboards. It is as though time has been turned back about twenty years. There is one kid who passes my house on his way to the dock every morning in the summer, a fishing pole slung over his shoulder and a rolling cooler trailing behind him. (You may whistle the Andy Griffith theme now.) I confess to having envy attacks some days when I see him, but mostly he just makes me smile.

This is the sheltered side of my yard, but that also means it has a big mosquito problem for most of the year. (Gathering pecans over here is a real test of will.) My Japanese magnolia looks a little bedraggled after our weekend cold front. The fence behind the ginger and split-leaf philodendron backs up to a Girl Scout camp, so most weekends of the year we hear a lot of giggling and shrieking as they play games. I tend to find it more charming than annoying, but I was a Girl Scout leader, so I'm biased.

So that's my neighborhood. Drop by sometime. We'll skip stones off the dock, then sit in the swing and chat over some iced tea.