Meeting more neighbors and caring for your neighborhood...

I walked down to the Bolton Hill Garden Club plant sale this morning and returned with a red sweet pepper and a purple sweet pepper plant. On the way back, I walked by a two gentlemen who were chatting outside their row house on Eutaw Place, a couple of blocks south of RHHP. One of them, whose name was Mike, was preparing to do some yard work. He noticed my pepper plants, and decided to aske me for some gardening advice. He wanted to know how to tell the weeds from the flowers in his little flower bed which had a clump of day lilies and some cosmos seedlings. The three of us entered into a pleasant conversation ranging from the pleasures of eating fresh vegetables to the differences between Seattle and Baltimore. Mike turned out to be the owner of the building and the other gentleman, Peter, was a tenant in Mike's building. Peter had relatives in Seattle and extolled the beauty of Seattle.

Somehow the conversation drifted to the subject of the Baltimore police. Mike recounted the time when he was approached and questioned by a police officer while he was dropping a bag of garbage in the can in the alley behind his building. The officers asked him for his identification and wanted to search him because he fitted the description of a black male wearing a white tee-shirt and there was report of someone of that description prowling the neighborhood. Mike was resigned to the incident and recognized that police officers had difficult jobs. I am happy to have met two more neighbors.

In the afternoon, I swept the carpet of flowers and pollen shed by the tree on the corner of our lot. As I did so, it occurred to me that it was almost a lost cause as more flowers and litter would soon carpet the sidewalk again. As I contemplated this sisyphean challenge, it occurred to me that it important for us to continue to keep our parts of our neighborhood tidy. One way to improve our neighborhood is for more residents to show that they care about their neighborhood. I believe a neighborhood is healthy not because of the wealth of its residents but because enough of them care for the place they call home. If this is true, then there is hope as I see more people in Reservoir Hill (mostly newcomers) out there in front of their houses tending to their yards and cleaning the sidewalks. One such person is Brian who lives one block away on Linden. On his own initiative, he keeps his block clean. He also mows the vacant lot across the street from his house every two weeks. Inspired by him, I mowed the vacant lot on the southwest corner of Linden and Whitelock and will adopt it as my ongoing project. I hope that there will soon be enough of us to form the critical mass. I think effort of many individuals can make significant changes to a neighborhood. Gentrification and affordability of a neighborhood is a whole different discussion.

I hope that through our own modest effort that we can be North Baltimore Mennonite Church's contribution to the community. Instead of merely taking advantage of the cheap real estate, NBMC is actually participating in Reservoir Hill through Ellen and myself.