Plastic Deer, Yes: Gated Communities, No

For the most part, I like living in Loonfoot Falls. The air is clean, the people are friendly, and mosquitoes aren't a problem after the first few killing frosts.

I suppose this exposes my rural naïveté, but it hadn't occurred to me until this week that Loonfoot Falls lacks one vital facet of contemporary culture.

We have not one single gated community.

Unless you count places like Fisk Implement. They've had a sturdy fence and a mildly paranoid alarm system ever since someone stole a harrow, back in 1996. Nobody lives there, apart from the occasional gopher: so it's not really a "community."

We don't have all that many fences of any sort in town. Much less walled-off neighborhoods where everybody inside is glad that they're not outside. I'm not sure if that says more for our values: or our desire to avoid having to mow near a fence.

It's not like we're some homogenized classless utopia. Houses around West 9th and Waterview Lane, or around Milldam Park, tend to be bigger than the ones on Siding Street. More expensive, anyway.

Some of the Waterview Lane places put on a nice show around Christmas time. The rest of the year, though, their yards are pretty plain. Nicely mowed, of course. Very trim.

Some of the folks who live on Siding Street don't wait for some holiday to embellish their lawns. Artificial deer are fairly popular. So is that sort of wind sculpture that looks like a duck flapping its wings.