This forlorn half a block of sidewalk is a contender for the saddest sidewalk in Lansing. I’m pretty confident in crowning it the saddest sidewalk on the east side, anyway. It’s the southernmost part of the side of Mifflin Avenue that actually has a sidewalk, which is of course the Lansing (i.e. west) side. The Lansing Township side has none.

The sidewalk here ends a short distance south of the last house, probably at the edge of that house’s lot. Further south from here, across Harton, is the Harton Street Pump Station. North of the last house there are two vacant lots where neighboring houses were torn down. The sidewalk is overgrown and disappearing from the start of the vacant area through to the end.

I nearly had my first sidewalk-blog-related injury taking these photos. Do you see what I suddenly saw as I stood there taking a photo (below) of the very last piece of concrete?

It’s poison ivy. I thought to myself that I was lucky I hadn’t gone any further, but then suddenly I had a bad feeling and turned around to look behind me. I could see more patches of it, some of it actually over the sidewalk such that I would have had to walk through it to get where I was standing. I never had poison ivy in my life until sometime in the last decade, and then I had a bad case of it that lasted six weeks. Now I am usually more careful, but being in the city caused me to let my guard down, foolishly. I was wearing shorts and sandals, so I walked home immediately after taking these photos and scrubbed myself down with Tecnu poison ivy remover. I would have broken out by now if I was going to get it, so either I somehow obliviously dodged it like a baby crawling through a construction zone in a cartoon, or I got all the oil off before I could react.