On the Street You Know

Daily Note and Daily Create

Every day, a photograph, a poem. Today’s #ds106 Daily Create @ds106dc #tdc3684 is to “Write an elevenie on the street you know from childhood.” And I would add: the street knows me and all the hours of play with neighborhood kids, unsupervised, but under the watchful eye of every mother and any neighbor who could stay home.

An elevenie is a form of poetry, which Wikipedia explains as:

I’ve written about the street I lived on from fourth grade on— a street whose sidewalks scraped my knee after a fall on my roller skates when my foot may have slipped out [key], and where the alley and spaces between houses held paths for hours of tag and hide ‘n seek with an entire entourage of neighborhood kids, and where the trees along the boulevard of every street cooled the hundred degree heat of summer as we walked barefoot in bathing suits, carrying our towels, by ourselves to the public swimming pool [25 cents, plus a nickel or dime for a small ice cream from Dairy Queen afterwards].

In April of 2019 my brother Bill passed away, and I took the time to reflect on our childhood by snapping a few pictures of the places the hold pieces of us.

The photo is of the street in front of our old farmhouse from 1890s [second from left], a tucked away house around which other houses grew in the 1940s, and in which my parents rented when we moved there about 1959, and in which my parents lived onward, except for the four months of my mom’s 73 year when she moved to an apartment, walking distance from the grocery store after my dad passed away, since my mom did not drive.

But the streets of around the block held sounds of tag, hide ‘n seek, girlfriend talk, hopping barefoot on the searing hot sidewalks on the walk about eight city blocks away to the local swimming pool. It’s those hot sidewalks shaded by the canopy of the elm, maple, and locust trees that remember well. So, my “elevenie:”

Elms
Leafing out
Over the sidewalks
Will counter summer’s heat:
Shade

Sheri Edwards
021222 043.365.22
Poetry/Photography
Photo:Avenue C and First Street
Bismarck, ND May, 2019

1080 days of posts in a row

For my brother Bill when I was first beginning my art journey: May 2017.

#ds106 Daily Create  @ds106dc #tdc3684 Write an elevenie on the street you know from childhood

Elms
Leafing out
Over the sidewalks
Will counter summer’s heat:
Shadehttps://t.co/RemSUEo1Df

— Sheri Edwards (@grammasheri) February 12, 2022