Border Street: You'll hear few complaints about the snow
By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)
Published January 15, 2007 at midnight
The people of Border Street, accustomed to having too much of what they don't want and not enough of what they do want, do not waste breath complaining about the snow. They ride out the successive storms in a literal fashion.
Since this is a street of laborers, of truck drivers, construction workers, landscapers, of people whose jobs or pastimes involve hauling large quantities of this or that, it is home to many four-wheel drives, which navigate the snow turned slush turned ice with little difficulty. The residents tend to maintain their vehicles themselves, and with devotion, so that even when the temperature drops to zero, it surprises no one to see that a neighbor has propped up the hood of his truck just to make sure the oil and other fluids have not fallen to unwise levels.
The quantity of snow and, perhaps, its beauty - frosted trees, meringued lawns, cold hush - provoke an uncommon camaraderie along Border Street. Watch out for the potholes at the end of the block, they're pretty bad. Let me help you with that snow.
Longtime Eddie and the Christian Lady who lives across from him stand in his driveway, each holding a shovel, and their laughter is heard down the block. The Patriarch's grandsons build a snow fort of such splendor they do not tire of recounting its dimensions. The Fed Up Neighbor's son drives his truck up and down the block, trying to pack the snow for other drivers.
The frequency of the snow showers and the frigid temperatures in between have kept several neighbors from taking down their Christmas decorations and this, too, gives Border Street an unusually festive feeling. The Patriarch's reindeer are knee-deep in drifts. The Christmas bows splash red on his white fence. Longtime Eddie keeps his living room decorated with strands of Christmas lights, gold garland, a teddy bear in a stocking, an angel on the television. The living room mirror above his head is covered by the words "Merry Xmas" in fake snow. He would have spelled out "Christmas" had he the room. As it is, the "M" in "Merry" clings precipitously to the frame.
He awakens one night to hear a grader pushing snow down the street. How about that, he says later. First time in 30 years.
The snow slows time. A woman and her young daughters living in subsidized housing move out sometime around Christmas. The neighbors aren't certain exactly when. She'd been having a rough go of it. Her husband went to prison. She sent her daughters to knock on nearby doors to buy cigarettes. They were beautiful little girls.
The snow shorts the checks of the landscapers and bricklayers. It offers a reprieve to the Fed Up Neighbor who has not had to tell the construction worker next door to lower his car radio or to look out her front window to see that recent newcomers to the street, a group of Spanish-speaking men, are once again sitting in their front driveway drinking beer.
That she feels sorry for her Mexican neighbors, sympathetic to whatever hardships they left and whatever they may face now, does not negate her demand that they live by the rules once they get here. As she sees it, this is the central challenge of life on Border Street: How to teach people who did not enter this country legally to become a part of it, to respect its ways.
Before Christmas, she went to a neighborhood meeting. Some urban planning students from the University of Colorado had worked all semester on a plan to help residents start taking charge of the neighborhood. The students had attended several evening community meetings, where they were somewhat stunned to learn the level of frustration was such that residents expected that they, college students, should go to City Hall on their behalf. We're not here to represent you, one of the students said. Then, came the reply from the audience: What good are you?
"They really want someone to take care of things right away," a student says later. "They feel like they are on the outside looking in."
The students gave their final presentation to residents at the meeting before Christmas. Only the Fed Up Neighbor showed up.
She later reads in the newspaper that her former neighbor, the Legal Permanent Resident, wondered why his American neighbors didn't talk to him before calling the police to complain that his family was creating a disturbance.
"That's bull crap," she tells one of her friends. "I did talk to them. Once about the laundry on the fence. Once about the music." After that, she called the police. "You're damn right I did. And I signed the complaint and they knew it was me because once the police left my house, they went right over to theirs."
The Fed Up Neighbor and the Legal Permanent Resident lived next door to each other for almost two years before he walked away from his house to live with his sister elsewhere in Denver. The house made its way to the county foreclosure records. Sold for: $159,950. Principal sum: $127,960. Outstanding principal balance: $126,140.44.
A neighbor down the block says she spotted some people from "We Buy Ugly Houses" looking at the place.
Orange traffic cones have been strung out across the head of the driveway, near the front porch. An orange sticker glows from the front window. It's an awkward stomp through the accumulation of three snowstorms to read the sticker. It says the locks have been changed.
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