Spilling over the porches

Whenever I walk back to my car at the end of the school day--usually parked a block or two from the school--my students--former, present and future, are spilling over the porch railings, ducking in and out of basement stairwells, shouting "Hello, Mrs!" from peeling doorframes and weaving from neighbor to neighbor's house like so many streamers. It's a sight I have only experienced in literature, or the stories of grandparents, of children playing in an urban neighborhood.

Our city is a relatively small one, and the homes of the neighborhood are mainly single or two-family wood-frame from the early 20th century, not apartment buildings or rowhouses.
The area is bordered on one side by the school, a 19th century church and the main drag through the city, on another by the public library and a colonial period graveyard, and another large street that borders public housing. The street I usually park on is pretty safe, but the one parallel has a lot of drug users and a disproportionate number of my special education students.

Anyway, if you walk down these streets on any afternoon, the kids are hanging out on various porches and sidewalks and empty lots, going in and out of each others homes unsupervised. One can say a lot about lack of supervision, but in a way I envy the freedom they have. Nowadays everything is a about "playdates" and you aren't even supposed to let a ten-year-old walk alone during the day. It's so different from when I was growing up, and the generations before had even more freedom to go from house to house or yard to yard spontaneously. My students, blissfully unawares, are in a time warp when it comes to their social lives. In that respect, they're lucky. I say this with a certain amount of reservation--knowing for a fact that registered sex offenders are living in their neighborhood--and yet, there is something in sight of children in spontaneous play that has gotten lost elsewhere.