The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

I live on West Seventh Street. In all likelihood, the above sentence means noth- ing to you unless:

You are planning to 'toilet paper' my house, or

You know about the West Seventh street reconstruction project.

Yes, the street near my home is being improved upon. Actively. As you read this very column.

The City plans to resur- face the road, creating two lanes of traffic with parking space on either side and a five-foot-wide sidewalk on the north side of the street, which just so happens to be (TP-ers take note) the side where my house is located.

Before you read any fur- ther, you need to know that I'm not outright opposed to the concept of a resurfaced West 7th. Given time, I'll probably come to appreciate the extra parking and the sidewalk.

But until the sidewalk is finally walkable (and that won't be until sometime this summer), I'll have to make do with a very eerie walk home.

To make room for the expansion, several large trees were cut down and branches were lopped off many small- er ones. This leaves next to no shade in the road. A new set of telephone poles has been installed right next to the old ones. The street is torn up in places, but as of now it's mostly as I remember it always being - a gently sloping swath of asphalt, its cracks covered by squishy ribbons of tar.

Imagine me walking home from school last Friday afternoon: A machine roars in the background. The birdcalls are faint and distant. The sun washes the color out of everything, with little shade in the road to temper its presence. The twin sets of telephone poles loom fore- bodingly over the tar-striped asphalt.

It was like walking through a wasteland.

Needless to say, I finished the journey home at a rather brisk pace and shut the back door to my house very firmly behind me.

I know it's only tempo- rary. Believe me, the more temporary the reconstruction is, the happier I'll be.

Because of some strange technical quirk, the new road will be built on top of the existing one. As a result, the sidewalk, which will be elevated above the road, will rise a full eighteen inches above our front yard.

Of course, the slope of our lawn can be modified so that there's not a stark drop. But all that cement is going to need to dry for a while, and I can just picture the strain of temptation weighing on my little brother.

Me: "It's city property! You can't just write random stuff in it!"

Him: "Hey, they cut limbs off my good climbing tree to build that sidewalk. The least they can do is let me write my name in the wet cement."

Me: "Really? Just your name? That's it?"

Him: "Yup."

Me: "Wow. I was expect- ing something morehellip;im- mature."

Him (chuckling evilly): "I never told you how big I was going to write ithellip;"

Change can be good. Transition, on the other hand, isn't all it's cracked up to be.