Well, it’s Mother’s Day. I’m not one, and I lost mine 11 years ago, so there’s not much to celebrate here.
Canopy of old oak trees
But the weather this morning seemed pleasant enough for a walk, thanks to overcast skies and a slight, cool breeze, so I leashed up my faithful companion, Tippy, and we headed due east on mine own historic Avenue O.
Unfortunately, after ten blocks or so at a quick pace, I was already dripping wet, due more to the mugginess of the air than to a particularly strenuous workout. Ready to get home and jump into a cool shower, I decided to trim this morning’s walk a bit, so we cut over two blocks and picked up Avenue O’s one-way counterpart, another historic avenue, P.
Sometimes it’s hard, though, turning around, especially when we take this particular route.
The farther east one travels on Avenue O, the older—and grander—the neighborhoods become. From my own block of modest 1930s-era Craftsman homes, to the next block over with its 1920s-vintage Tudor Revival cottages, one continues to walk backward in time, to the turn of the century and then even earlier still, finally arriving in the canopied neighborhoods of Galveston’s late-nineteenth-century Victorians.
A few of these old Havishams are battered indeed but most of them are tidy, many with freshly-tilled gardens of sweet-smelling flowers, and all of them with the wistful echo of an intoxicating, bygone age. Many of the homes here wear plaques pinned on like purple hearts, honoring them as survivors of the Great Storm of 1900 that almost made an easy job of it for future cartographers by nearly wiping old Galveston off the maps forever.
But it’s peaceful here now, in these quiet, enveloping neighborhoods, where the oleanders are blooming in pink and white, and the roots of the giant, old, sheltering oaks bulge up through the sidewalks here and there, protesting the pedestrian who would disturb their ancient vigil.
Sometimes it’s hard to break the spell, to turn around, to leave…
(For the rest of this story, see “Four!“.)