There goes the neighborhood...

Cafe al fresco this morning.

In addition to the industrial dumper at the curb (teaming with the wretched-refuse of five weeks kitchen remodeling), the view from the front porch was reduced to a plastic gray port-a-potty on the front walk...the dry-waller’s pickup, parked in the middle of the street...and a massive green cherry picker lumbering down the alley in search of some disaster behind the Lutheran church.

You don’t expect to see those sorts of things in an historic neighborhood of century-old Victorian houses. Read about them, maybe—in stories by Edgar Allen Poe—but you don’t expect to see them.

The weekend’s HazMat crew? Please, don’t ask.