The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Most of us red blooded freedom loving Americans hate to take a vacation, not because we are fun-averse, but because when we come back to the Job, we have to work doubly hard to catch up with all the unfinished bizness we left behind.  I should know, having just returned from a three week road trip cross country to find all the backlog waiting open jawed.  For the purpose of this lament, I’m going to skip the saga of the broken drain in the kitchen sink I’m still trying to repair.  You’ve heard enough plumbing nightmares from me to last a Maytag repairman’s lifetime.  Instead I’m going to focus on my little park across the island and the mudhole I left behind.

If you’ve missed the previous bitching about my county park guy telling me he was going to put my request at the bottom of his To-Do list because I’d complained that after two or more years I was sick and tired of my parking lot that was a complete mudhole hell after any rains, well, count yourself lucky.  Me, I just pretty much figured that car swallowing tarpit would have to stay the same, an invitation to vandals that nobody cared about this little pocket park so go ahead and trash the place.  But … to my surprise, I got a photo on the trip from a neighbor showing gravel had been spread over the parking lot, not really evenly or tamped down, but hellfire, better than tire-sucking mud any day of the week.

Turns out, though, someone, probably the county, had dumped the gravel and a good Samaritan neighbor got tired of looking at the little mountain of it so he drove his tractor down and spread the stuff.  All fine and dandy, you might think, but I think maybe the county might have planned to even out the craters, spread the thicker gravel next, then add the 5/8ths minus stuff on top, kind of a professional job.  Oh well, another South End attempt at do-it-yourself gone awry, which reminds me, I got that drain to fix later today.

Needless to say I’m waiting for the county to contact me now that I’m back, tanned and rested from our trip back east.  I’m expecting a pretty pissed off county guy to call any day now.  Course, I’m not answering phones.  And in the future I expect I won’t just get put at the bottom of the To-Do list, I’ll be on my own from here on out.  Sometimes you just can’t catch a break.  And you probably shouldn’t take vacations….

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The South End Little Library has suffered more than its share of indignities since its grand opening a year or so ago. Vandals the first week tossed books from their shelves in the GTE repurposed phone booth, burned a few, then painted obscenities on the glass windows. Bringing literacy to the denizens of the backwashes here, I realized as head librarian, was going to be no easy task. But really, book burning? It wasn’t as if the burnt volumes were controversial. One was a child’s book about a rabbit and … well, it was hard to decipher through the burnt cover. So who knows, maybe a gay rabbit. Or a rabbit that used curse words. Or an atheist rabbit. Or these illiterates just didn’t like rabbits.

A few months ago the shelves were pulled out of the booth and the books strewn across the lawn to spend a soggy night in the rain before I discovered the mayhem, too late for about six dozen books. For a week I closed the library, put up a sign that the closure was due to vandalism, then debated with myself whether to restock the shelves. No good deed goes unpunished down in this neck of the dark woods. Ignorance is bliss, they tell me, and maybe I was trying to bring my own brand of religion to the unwashed masses who already had Trump to worship.

My little park, a five acre tract with some nice firs and cedars along its trails, is a magnet for garbage disposal, midnight trysts and miscreant hidey-holes. We’ve had broken glass strewn across the parking area, camouflaged pits dug back in the woods with sharpened sticks waiting for unwary hikers, staging areas for stolen goods hidden in the brush, used condoms tossed nightly. Trees and shrubs I’ve planted have been dug up and stolen. Sculptures have been swiped, grills purloined, rocks thrown into the grassy areas to make mowing a shrapnel nightmare. Being the head ranger has been a study in negative human behavior.

So when I went over a few days ago to mow and found the window of the library smashed out with a bottle, I can’t say I was very surprised. No doubt the work of anitfa, left wing radicals and those pesky anarchists tired of looting the urban swamps. Federal troops would likely be mobilized to help me guard this place now, good news. Although library use would probably hit rock bottom. Price you pay for Stormtroopers protecting the Homeland, I guess.
After mowing I went home, got rakes and brooms and returned to clean up the mess. Sure, I grumbled, I whined, I shook my fist. But what are you gonna do? Indeed. Right now I have a hole in my little biblioteca where the rain and the wind can come through. I’m thinking maybe boarding it up rather than replace the glass for future missile throwers. Paint something on it maybe. You know, see if art can soothe the savage beasts on the barbarian South End. I know, fat freakin chance.

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