Three Fortune Tellers

The three seven year old little girls across the street set up a lemonade style stand on the sidewalk and asked me if I wanted a poem, my fortune, a foot or hand massage, and my nails painted black, blue, beige, red, maroon with glitter, or six shades of pink.

At first I said no thanks to the nail polish, and yes to the illustrated poem:

Summer is the best
Umbrellas are the best
Nature is full of animals

Then I went inside my house and thought about it. They were so adorable! I went back out and let them paint my nails.

I was their only customer for a while but then people started to stop by.
The girls forgot to write in the fortunes (origami style fortune telling)--so we thought of stuff and I wrote it down on the inner flaps of the folded paper:

put lipstick on your nose,

wear your hat backwards,

eat a spider,

a wolf bites your face,

werewolf in your house,

spider bites you while sleeping

drink water and sing a song

sit at the table backwards

sing upside down

Then a neighbor they know from the building came out and sat in the big brown barcalounger on the sidewalk. She ate a chicken dinner with a white plastic fork and knife. She told them she was leaving the leftover roast chicken for the girls, and I put it in the shade so it wouldn't spoil. When they took a break from selling poems, two of the girls hid behind the Barcalounger squeezing against the chain link fence and they picked apart the roasted chicken. There was a lot of food there but they only had one fork.

I ran in and got them another plastic fork. This is our breakfast Arianna said. Nadalia wanted to try sucking the marrow out of the bones. "There's lots of vitamins in the marrow," I said.
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If they're outside this weekend maybe I will bring out my baby red Hohner accordion and see if they want to make up songs.

The new Dominican-American market opened on the ground floor on Monday. Now the kids can go downstairs and get anything they want! Candy, candy, candy! And ice cream!

They all live in the same building - summer, weekends, nights, rain, snow, anytime they have each other. Their fathers work odd jobs and their mothers hang loads and loads of laundry on the porches to dry. They beat the rugs clean, against the porch pillars and they shop and cook. They have lots of children to manage.

Everything is audible here - the fights, laughter, yelling, barking. It is a neighborhood with invisible walls. Like a doll-house.

I would love to do art projects, right on the sidewalk so the parents are nearby. We could make apple dolls, papier mâché puppets, pizzelle-making, sew costumes etc. I have two folding card tables, paper scraps, and fabric scraps.

I hope for a long Indian summer season except that Lily is itchy from ragweed pollen even with her pond swimming and generic Benadryl tablets taken in peanut butter, she is scratching.

Our new neighbors have three cats and they are house cats that they have decided to not let back inside. They put out food and water but the cats cry all night in the alley which is like a microphone.

Most two bedroom apartments here have 6-8 people living inside. The poverty in the 'hood is phenomenal. I see it when my neighbors hang up their towels and sheets -- they are worn-through like gauze.

Luckily our city is not afraid of poverty. There are no snobs here. We have a great Salvation Army and bargain stores and loads of charities. All you need to do is ask for help and the generosity is there.

Some days, I feel like Margaret Meade watching, studying peoples lives.