Errands this morning, driving all around the outskirts of Wilmington for this and that. (I haven't been in downtown Wilmington for at least two years. The last time I was down there, I was accosted by the Inept Mugger, a guy who hung around the Public Library and told people to give him their wallets. I don't know if anybody ever did; I didn't. A few weeks after I was there he attacked someone on the library steps with a metal pipe, and hurt the woman really badly.)
First: the house next door. We haven't seen any lights on in there for a couple of weeks. It's a young couple with a little boy. As the snow melted, we saw multiple copies of our local newsletter on the lawn, along with their collapsed Santa blow-up. We know of a couple of other houses in the neighborhood, one where 'For Sale' signs used to be up for maybe a week before the house sold, that are apparently abandoned. We don't know if this one has been. We went over to tell them that a border shrub had been destroyed by the snow, and we were going to take it down, but no one answered.
Dunkin Donuts. Special treat. A woman was at the counter yelling at one of the family who owns the place, a Bengali woman; there was something wrong with number five, and she had her hand up and was shouting "Five! Five!" as the rest of the customers shuffled and felt embarrassed.
The little butcher shop where we get as much of our meat as we can afford is pulling in its horns. For a couple of years they were extending into catering, take-home meals, and frozen stuff. But the take-home menu is gone, and there are no signs for catering. It was still crowded. That's good. They grind their own beef.
I had to go to Target. They've remade themselves, which is great if you do your grocery shopping there (I don't; I go to the bargain place across the road), and awful if all you want is a pumice stone and a sharpener for garden tools. The garden tool department has been cut in half to accomodate two new rows of food. No sharpener. Today's cashier was a thin young woman with tangled hair who stood hunched over, as if she expected one of her customers to hit her.
Past the building on the corner where there was a gas station, but they tore it down and built a building for a physical therapy clinic that left, and was a tire store that closed, and until a few weeks ago was housing the closing sale of a local furrier. Empty again, now.
And finally, the florist (long story) that used to be lovely and lush. Not so much right now. Cans of sad-looking flowers with broken blossoms.
Is it me? There were dozens of people not yelling at the donut shop, buying their half-double-vanilla-whatever coffee and egg-whites-only bagels. The butcher shop is still there, and their meat is good. Target seems to be doing well. There are always empty buildings, and maybe the flowers get delivered on Mondays.
Maybe. But a local bank is laying off 700 people, and for all I know our neighbors both worked there. Or at one of the local suppliers that worked with the bank. More and more of the customers at Target look like today's cashier. There are more and more empty buildings, business I've used forever just gone. Florists are not likely to forge new relationships with suppliers so they can watch their stock die. And realtors (the woman yelling at the help was wearing a badge with a local firm's name on it) must be getting tense.
My city, your city. Everything I see scares me some days.