Rendezvous Road Earth Day clean up organizer Mariah Lucy (left) and her mom, Brooke Lucy.
My freshman year in college, I sat next to a cute boy in a Western Civilization course. Let’s call him “Chris,” since that’s how I swear he introduced himself to me. We got to know each other a bit, Chris and I did, and late in the quarter we decided to go out. On the first date, Chris said to me “There’s something I have to tell you.” Visions of a hometown girlfriend ran through my head (a vision that later proved to be a reality, but that is irrelevant to this story). He came right out with it, “My name is Eric.” I’d been calling him the wrong name for three months; I was mortified.
But not as mortified as I was last week when I learned that the owner of the feed store is not Katrina Evans, as my article about her refers to her no fewer than nine times. No, her name is Katrina Auburn. I’ve only been buying chicken feed and cover crop seed from Katrina for a dozen years, and I’ve worked at an office less than a block away from her since 2010. I bet I’ve talked to Katrina once a month for more than a decade, so it’s particularly embarrassing to get her last name wrong. Luckily I’ll be wearing a mask the next time I go into the feed store, so maybe she won’t recognize me. My apologies, Katrina.
Before I learned of my feed store mistake, I spent a pleasant couple of hours on a neighborhood clean-up of the trash along 2 miles of Twin Lakes Road, between Wolf Creek Road and Patterson Lake Road. It’s an annual reminder that drinking and driving are alive and well on Twin Lakes Road (and, by some accounts, are even more widely practiced on Patterson Lake Road). As a parent of children whose use of this road for biking and running is robust, this concerns me, but at least the empties in the ditch remind me to lecture the kids on staying alert when they’re out on the road.
A neighborhood clean-up of Rendezvous Road two weeks ago resulted in the same realization about alcohol consumption in vehicles, although the Rendezvous gang’s haul was even more hefty than ours, and included not only cans and bottles, but also car mufflers and an intact wallet, which was returned to its owner. Organized by 15-year-old Rendezvous resident Mariah Lucy, the clean-up involved 17 families and covered the entire length of Rendezvous Road.
Afterwards, the road looked better and the people felt better. Despite practicing 6 feet of social distancing guidelines, after the cleaning effort one neighbor reported, “we felt closer as a community.”
