Funky Town

We live in a funky little town. For many years it was fairly isolated, with only a ferry across from Marin and a two-lane road coming in from El Cerrito and points south. In those years, it was a railhead on the town side of the hill (it still is, complete with train whistles and backups when the trains are a-building) and a sort of hippie-artist-vacation retreat on the bay side with little summer cottages and wacky, unplanned houses that look homemade.

When the bridge was built to Marin and the freeway both connected us to the rest of the world and cut us off from the larger city of Richmond, our town changed. Newer houses were sandwiched in between the older cottages as, one by one, all the lots were filled. From unheated summer cottages to McMansions with hot tubs in the bathrooms - we have them all now. The town has never lost its funky character, however, and the people here are still refugees from the Establishment. Weeds go unpulled, trees grow willy-nilly, and people don't judge each other on the neatness of their properties.

Few people actually cultivate a garden - mostly, we are happy to accept the volunteers that spring up and, if they are pretty, to encourage them. Some folks do have planned gardens, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and even they tend to weeds amongst the cultivars. Even the food gardens are a little haphazard with weeds rampant between the rows.

Every now and then as I walk around the streets, I am stopped in my tracks by a scene like this - impossibly purple morning glories growing up and around impossibly orange pyracantha berries accented against an incredibly blue sky. If I put that on a postcard, you'd swear I had touched it up.

In a few weeks, the robins will come through and strip the pyracantha of its berries and the morning glories will fade until next spring. An earnest gardener probably would have discouraged the morning glories from overwhelming the pyracantha; I'm grateful that I live in a funky town where benign neglect allows such amazements to happen.