January 1, 2026: Looking Down -

The Buffalo Pothole Bandit came to Portland this year, and transformed some of our potholes. These two works of art are in my neighborhood, and I like them very much.

There’s a map on the Bandit’s Facebook page of their other works around Portland (and around the country – most of their work is on the East coast). If I am filled with ambition someday, I may go on a ramble around town to find more of them. Today is not that day, though. Today the Alarmist Weather app predicts sleet, and though I don’t set much store by their predictions, I’m pretending to believe this one, so I can sit in front of the fire. Happy New Year!

Also in my neighborhood, there is an installation depicting some terrible tragedy involving plastic miniatures.

As with much installation art, no photos can deliver the impact of walking the whole route, which includes maybe 60 or 70 figures. Still, I’ll give you a few tastes.

It might depict a Ghosts-vs-Animals tale, or an Ghosts-of-Animals tale. Or maybe I’m not thinking big enough.

My choicest find, looking down, was this sodden Christmas card, which I carefully pried off of the sidewalk.

If it’s yours, please claim it soon, because it’s leaving glitter all over, and we are not a glitter household. And yes, ordinarily, I’d have thrown it away, but it has this laboriously handwritten note inside (in cursive!!), and I can’t:

Happy Christmas, my dear naiece!

I love you and am thinking of you. I sent a few of my favorites to you. Also, enjoy a fancy coffee on me.

Miss you so much! Love, Auntie (Scribble)

This missive has captured my heart. At first, I was mad at Dear Naiece. Auntie Scribble lives on a fixed income, and she scrimped up five bucks so that Dear Naiece could have a fancy coffee, and DN didn’t even have the decency to put the card in a receptacle, she just took the money and dropped the card on the ground. Ungrateful – and also littering! - wretch. (If you ever had an Auntie Scribble, you know that the card held five bucks, the price of a “fancy” coffee.)

Once I got over resenting Dear Naiece, I started pondering the “few favorites.” They had to fit in the envelope. Dried flowers? Friendship bracelets? Clippings from the newspaper? My own Auntie Scribble sent newspaper clippings, but are clippings even a thing anymore? New Yorker cartoons? Photographs? How about old photographs that AS keeps in a shoebox, from back when they were physical and not something people looked at on a screen? DN didn’t drop THOSE, at least! Maybe I’m being too hard on DN. Maybe the card on the sidewalk just fell out of her backpack.

And then, finally, I moved onto the love, and the “thinking of you,” and the “Miss you so much!” Maybe it was just the normal holiday heightening of sentiment and melancholy and bittersweetness, but I spent a few slightly misty days thinking about my mom’s Auntie Scribble – so, okay, she was my own GREAT Auntie Scribble, but we left the GREAT off - who sent me the oddest things. Not just clippings.

Once, in my teens, I got a thick, squishy envelope from her, which suggested something really interesting might be inside. It turned out to be a Handi-Wipe, neatly folded. I unfolded it, assuming it was cushioning the interesting something in the middle, but no. I checked the other side, in case the interesting something was stuck to the back. Nope.

My mom had watched this whole process. I held the Handi-Wipe up and said, “I don’t know what the thank-you note should say.” Mom, a veteran of such gifts, said crisply, “Oh, that one’s ‘Thank you for thinking of me!’ ”

I could easily imagine I might become an Auntie Scribble myself, or at the very least, a sender of clippings. Since picking up the card, I’ve decided that yes, it did come to pass, if we just substitute sending links. This very week, I sent a link to my Dear Nephew and his wife. It was to the Bathtubs in Fields Appreciation Group.

I thought they’d enjoy it, and I just may be right, as the group has 32,000 members! (The schismatics - the Bathtubs NOT in Fields Appreciation Society (capitalization theirs) - has only 748 members. A small and irascible fellowship, but dammit, they know what they don’t like.)

I kept the Handi-Wipe for years. Then I accidentally used it to clean something up, and I had to let it go. (In the proper receptacle!) I’m thinking of buying some now, for auld lang syne.