Where the Wild Things Are

Part I.

While perusing through some of my old books, I came upon a very worn but intact and unmarked copy of the Maurice Sendak classic Where the Wild Things Are. The image of monsters dancing under moonlight with claws and jagged smiles clicked in my imagination. And there it was; the drawing that captured and coined my own and so many other kids sense of the wild. Something so frightening and liberating, lawless and exciting, and colored in a way to reveal the mystery of reflected sunlight off the earths only moon. Magic.

Between my aunts, my father, my sister and myself the book has surely been read 1000 times. For the first time I noticed, across the floral interior cover board, the date on the first page, copyright 1963… a first printing of the first edition.

Part II

In My Backyard is a strange place. It is a leftover space; the interior of a large block that was apparently never considered. There are many spaces like this around the Capitol Hill neighborhood, and likely hundreds more in the entirety of dc.

All kinds of odd things happen beyond my backyard and various people have taken claim to this hole in the grid. In an attempt to amplify the wild of my back door nature I think that this space, as well as the many others, could use something more. So how to build upon the wild of this patch? One idea might be to plant it as densely as possible with native coniferous plants and attract as many birds as possible… a kind of neighborhood bird palace protected by a moat of humans. As protectors of our many two winged friends we could make baths from satellite dishes, and give the birds selection of our leftover cereals. We could watch them enjoy breakfast from our backyard tables and wonder if they enjoy music. Other Wild Things would join them and suddenly the dead center would swell and spill out to colonize the dying street trees, the mosaic extending from castle to castle.