and these leafy mysteries

Old North Davis, Historic North Davis, the couple of blocks north of downtown, old houses and leafy sidewalks, now crunchy with the fallen. I'm starting my correspondence with the urbane; in other, larger cities, streets of this sort might be well hidden from the hives of activity, the rush hours, the packed commuter streets, but not here. Davis is a small college city, home to the large UC Davis campus, on a flat plain in California's Central Valley; packed commuter streets here consist of thousands - millions - of bikes flouting traffic laws as they zip across campus between classes, trails of lost notes and knocked-down professors in their wake. That's why this isn't 'suburban' - that might imply that the 'urban' is much different. It really isn't.

But a city it is, and a growing one; they've just done a good job of preserving some of what we foreigners think of as Old America charm, and keeping it genuine, not forced. Whenever I want to show people back in the UK that I really do live in America, I draw things like this. There's even a yellow fire hydrant. This could be apple-pie country.