Grace notes.

I took a photo walk today around my neighborhood.
It was and was not pleasant.  The day was beautiful, for February, but my neighborhood is not.  There are so many well-built houses, but many of them are abandoned and actively decomposing.  There is litter everywhere.  The houses that are lived in and kept up look pretty good, though a lot of them are obviously maintained on very little money.  The decomposition is rampant, with as many as three condemned houses in a row, or half the houses on a block.

These houses used to shelter families.  They each had character and were quietly proud of themselves.  Now...

Anyway, the pictures make me too angry, so I'm not showing them to you yet.  It was hard enough just photographing them.  Instead, I'm showing the beauty I found, even among the wreckage.

It's a somber, melancholy beauty, mostly because the only thing that's looking rich and luxuriant right now are mosses clinging to gnarled tree roots or shady bits of lawns.  It's the end of february, and the bare stalks of winter are slowly disintegrating into incoherent muddiness in preparation for the new growth of March and April.
The damp and gray matched the neighborhood, and my mood.