Three years from the barrio

Kristi had to work this morning, so Noble and I were looking for something to do. Noble found something. He fell asleep, so I went for a drive around the neighborhood that we lived in before we moved to Brenham.

This was the neighborhood we lived in when Kayci was born. The last time I was here was one year ago, when I was in the area taking pictures following huurricane Ike. A year ago I attributed the state of the neighborhood to the pounding it took from the storm. But one year removed, it's apparent that the old hood has just declined significantly.

On my old street it's apparent that some if the older residents that used to live there have moved out and others have moved in. There are houses sitting vacant where families used to live, their yards overgrown. My next door neighbor's house looked completely different. It was a different color, and all the trees and bushes had been chopped down. The door was partly broken and the screen door was hanging off its hinges. Jy old house, however, looks great! It actually looks better than it did when we lived there. They've redone the landscaping, have repainted and have replaced the old door with nice new one. It's good to see that the new owners are taking good care of it. That made me happy.

But then driving around other parts of the old neighborhood, it was apparent that everything had just fallen into a general state of disrepair. There are now cars -and lot of them - on the street and parked in yards and driveways. Trash is piling up around people's houses, including tires and old furniture. It reminded me a lot of my trip out to West Texas last year to some of the little desert towns. People apparently just don't want to get rid of anything, so they keep them in their yards.

But what made me the most sad was the state of our old church. It sits on a full block and two thirds of the block used to be like a park with grass on the ground and tall trees - almost a hundred of them - with a tall canopy that shaded the area underneath. It was beautiful. I know that Hurricane Ike damaged some of the trees, but whoever took the trees down did a horrible job. There are stumps sticking up everywhere - some as tall as I am. My guess is that only about 30 or 40 of the trees are still standing. It was quite depressing.

I wasn't expecting everything to be the same. But what did strike me was how much everything had changed in just three years. It's not as if it was a great neighborhood then, either. It was a lower-middle class neighborhood that was about 40-50 years old. But it still felt like a nice place to be a family. I couldn't say that now based on what I saw.