Missing Wood

This is a traffic island (as we call them) which lies between the on-ramp of a highway and a road leading to a bridge in West Philadelphia, near to my home. Nobody thinks about it much. It can't be seen from anyone's kitchen window, and if you drive past it, you'd never notice. It's a miscellaneous, unimportant scrap of urban land, developed as it is about fifty years ago.

I am blipping this thing because this is the first time I've ever seen it cleared like this. Only about ten months ago I was sketching out scenarios in my mind, where this patch of forgotten jungle (the way it was) could be a good place to set up camp if I were to go homeless. Once when Ceridwen visited, I made a point of showing her the place, and another time I laid a dead raccoon here and blipped it. There were a few trees that must have been intentionally planted when the thing was new, but I forget the species. Maybe one or more of those are among the survivors.

I was sure that for the forseeable future, the city would not bother clearing the overgrowth, and it would continue on as a little patch of woods, so close to perhaps a million people every day, but unknown to them all. The inside of it was used by either partiers or homeless people or both, but rarely, and in very small numbers, by the looks of it.

I brought my pruners, but there was nothing left to prune.

Goodbye, Little Wood!