Life at Home

In the interest of keeping my brain from atrophy, I'm going to focus the SlajTrip (TM) on my current, more stationary journey. The Malibu is still in motion, mostly between here and Waterbury but sometimes to such exciting towns as Seymour and Middlebury. Oooh. Let's begin.
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My neighborhood is one of cars. Each family has at least two, often more, but the driveways next to our cube houses are only long enough for a couple, and no one uses his garage for vehicles. So the pickups and sedans spill out into the streets, line the sidewalks.
The houses here were built all together, an Industrial Age development for the workers in the big brick mill downtown. Once a shoe factory, now an apartment complex. I've never been inside, but I hear they have a pool.
My neighborhood is the development. All the houses looked the same, once, but over 90 years porches have been added, and then enclosed, new wings have appeared along with fences and pools. They still mostly do look the same, all square boxes with tiny front lawns and flag poles. The bigger ones along one road, they were the bosses' houses.
Trees have grown and some have fallen, but for the most part the neighborhood is wide open. We're all in each others' views.
I haven't known the neighbors since my kickball-in-the-street days. Children don't have games like that now. Do their parents think it's too dangerous, to play in the road with cars speeding around corners and through stop signs? Maybe. But a few of the children here have turned to guns instead.
BB guns. The little boy across the street and the littler boy who lives behind us stalk around, rifles slung over their shoulders, shooting stop signs and squirrels and playing war games. The one across the street, I know his dad has a whole rack full of real guns. It's all a little unsettling.
The other house behind us, it's two adults and a yippy miniature Doberman named Rocky. They have a jambox that hangs from a hook on the wall. They play this jambox on Saturday and Sunday mornings while they garden and set up windchimes and other whimsical crap around the yard. They've chosen, apparently permanently, the worst radio station in the state.
But right now, it's quiet. The sky is overcast, which always seems to absorb sound. Recess is over, so you can't hear the kids screaming on the playground. No one's around to work on their houses or yell at their kids. The dogs are inside, their barking muffled. It'll get louder later.
That's all for now.