So, this is my inaugural blog post over here in the new digs. It’s been fun to see over four years of blog posts move with me. Skimming down the list I’ve realized that there are common themes that seem to repeat: children and consumerism; work/family balance (especially in the summer); simple living struggles. I found one that seems particularly timely, even though I wrote Pool Politics four years before a private pool in suburban Philadelphia made international news for asking a camp of mostly black and Latino kids to leave, despite the fact that the camp had paid for access to the pool. Hearing about the racist comments made by the white parents, many of whom pulled their kids out of the pool when the camp kids got in, was painful to me—but not surprising. Were people really unaware that we have a segregated pool system in the Philadelphia area?

Since that post four years ago, our neighborhood public pool has been shut down due to budget cuts. I can’t help thinking that if the public pools were used by a greater cross-section of our population, they wouldn’t be so easy to shut down. Our neighborhood garden has been shut down, too. In the end, it was the lack of neighbor support that kept us from getting permanent garden status, though the neighbors haven’t gotten their parking lot either. With the lock no longer on the gate, the property is a sea of weeds and dog poop. Both the pool and the garden remind me that “divided we fall” is more than just a cliché—there’s quite a bit of truth in it. g7c3bifdu