Small victories

I don't know what made me think of this today. When we moved into our house many years ago, there was a street sign dead center of my front yard. When I looked out my front door, there stood the sign. When we had company, you couldn't pull a car off the road, because of the sign. Besides being an eyesore, the sign erroneously marked the designation of the streets simply by it's location. I live on a curve, more an L, with the vertical and horizontal segments each having a different name. Since my house is 4 houses from the meeting point, it didn't make sense to me how the sign had ended up in my yard. It annoyed me...but what are you going to do? Though I do recall asking a friend with a wrecker to tie a chain around it and drive off. But there could have been all those pesky legal issues and surely the sign would just be replaced. So, I lived with it. The husband wouldn't even agree to me planting a flowering vine to grow up it.

Then one a day, a construction crew showed up. They were going to work on a drainage project which involved realigning all the ditches in the neighborhood to improve flow of water. They made a huge mess and disrupted everything in the neighborhood. Then one day, I noticed the street sign was down while they were working in my yard. I watched and I wondered. I walked out on the sidewalk and struck up a conversation. After offering cold water to drink and some idle chit-chat, I suggested maybe the sign could get lost. Nope, they said, everything they took down had to be put back. I queried, in the exact same place? I explained how the sign was really in the wrong place and pointed to where the street actually changed names.

I was smiling from ear to ear, when my husband came home from work that afternoon and I pointed out my handy work...he just shook his head. I wonder how long it took the guy across the street to notice the street sign in his yard? I wonder if he'd ever paid attention to where it was before? It is more accurately located now, not that anybody really cared. And it is in his side yard, blocked from his view by a large evergreen.