Our house, in the middle of our street

Excuses excuses: A kitchen full of food and people. A kitchen like the carcass of a gazel. If you don't join the circle of hyenas and get your snout in it then all that'll be left is the gristle. And these other hyenas are good folk: two stoic Finnish, one sassy French Canadian, a disgruntled and drunken Australian, a mum Pole, a young Slovak runaway, and a dashing and daring Minnesotan with a wry sense of humor bred from the long cheerless winters of the high prairie country. You might notice one glaring absence from this laundry list: Our house has a lack of that thick Catalan and Spanish blood. Well, its not my fault.

Our house is a large cumbersome old thing. Empty for at least twenty years, its only crime is inefficiency. The largest construction company in Barcelona bought it up to tear it town. Soon its footprint will be like the rest of this city: a boxy five story apartment building wall to wall with neighboring five story apartment buildings that look almost exactly alike. The ground floor is divided into a large business space that might have been used by a mechanic and a massive kitchen thats the best room in the house, with more gleaming white counter space then in right. I think it was rebuild for restaurant use. The business space with the large doors to the street is walled off from us, and is so full of rubble and boxes and metal and furniture we just can't bring ourselves to clear it out. We have the only back yard on the block, and it to was overwhelmingly crowded with trash, but we tackled it good. Green space in this part of town is so rare it would be a real shame to let it waste away under tons of debris. There are a couple shacks out back that have become bedrooms, and we have the best tiki-lounge this side of the Mississippi. Surf boards, hanging chandeliers, christmas lights, a burn barrel, and palm fronds. Thats right. Palm fronds.

The upstairs has five bedrooms and lots of holes in the floor covered with wood. People tried to squat this house a year ago and got thrown out the next day. Some beefy construction guy thought that if he punched some holes in the floor and made a huge mess that nobody would want to squat it. If he had done that to the roof, he would have been right. But a shovel, a broom, and some well laid boards foiled his poorly laid plans. The upstairs upstairs is a delicious sunny patio.

It is big, it is dirty, but it is ours. Except for one small balcony. That is still the pigeons.

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Our house, was our castle and our keep
Our house, in the middle of our street
Our house, that was where we used to sleep
Our house, in the middle of our street (3X)

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