Beauty among the wreckage

.
Despite my small city's fairly urban character it still retains vestiges of its village roots. In the center of the city is a small commercial street, a remnant of days gone by. It looks a bit rundown, as many these days do. Too many stores lie empty, unable to compete with the big new mall just a mile away, but enough remain viable that it still retains its neighborhood feel. I can still buy groceries, or new sheets and towels, or art supplies, or fresh-baked pastries; I can fill prescriptions, or stock up on fresh-roasted cashews, or by clothes for my kids, or even buy a new friend for my fish without ever getting into my car.
.

Between the small family-run businesses which continue on unchanged year after year are those buildings which time forgot. Old sheds which should have been condemned years ago. Nature has a way of reclaiming her own though, even in the middle of the city.

.

Around one of these old structures wraps the most magnificent bougainvillea bush imaginable, it's fuschia flowers shining brighter than the sun against the fading white paint of the shed. Each year it bursts into bloom, begging me to come photograph its fleeting beauty. Each year I tell it that I will, and each year I do not.

.

Until this year. Yesterday I finally made the time to answer the unspoken invitation, and another surprising spoken one.

.
.

Nature has claimed a bigger stake with each passing year. First it was the shed

.

.
And then the telephone pole

.

.

And then the date palm nearby

.

.

(Do you see the dates growing high above?)

.
.

And all the while I was being watched. Mordechai lives across the street from the bougainvillea, in the modest old home best known for being the one that sets out a tray of wet bread scraps for the pigeons each day (I'd often wondered who did that). Each day he sits on an old plastic chair in the shade of the tree, watching the world go by. He watched silently as I took pictures. When he saw that I had finished he quietly asked what I'd been doing. When I explained, he asked to have his picture taken with the tree too.

.

Here it is. Mordechai. And yes, I do believe that he was sitting outside in his boxer shorts, but we shall ignore that and leave him with his dignity intact.

.

.