The (dino) geese are back atop the 10th Street Bridge by Pittsburgh’s South Side. “There’s a real risk right now to the city losing the character and the history that it’s had and people are starting to be aware of that and don’t want to just wash everything off and turn it into a shiny new place again,” said Brandon Barber, who assisted longtime friend and fellow artist Tim Kaulen as they perched 100 ft. above the street to try to match up to the painted geese Tim painted on the bridge some 20 years prior.

I’ve gawked up at those paintings since I first moved to the city, wondering about them, about how they got there and what they meant (and thinking they were dinosaurs). 995 people who signed a petition to save the art have been wondering alongside me, creating their own stories and meaning for the four-foot-tall figures.

Tim says he loves that people have crafted their own meaning behind them. “I felt that my community needed a spark, a highlight, something to say: there’s something here, there’s a pulse here that’s important, and there’s a voice here.” From his seat at OTB Bicycle Cafe in the neighborhood where he came of age as an artist, Tim talks inspiration from his grandfather’s primitive, handmade decoys, why he took risk for art in the 1st place, and being mindful to stand against the erasure of culture, work, character, and history in the city as it goes through a period of rapid change.

Sound on for the video, and see/read more at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here.

Hearing Kim Bowles tell her story in between catching frogs, drawing with chalk, and healing the stubbed toes of her two small children really allowed me to feel why the stakes are so high for her, why when she heard “Stage-3 Cancer” months after giving birth to her second child, she did everything she could to make sure she’d be there to raise her children. What I didn’t know, is that the twisted, nightmarish experience she had on the operating table is one that is going on with women across the country. 

“Bowles, a stage 3 breast cancer survivor, had just undergone double mastectomy surgery and had told her surgeon to make her “flat”—that is, do not reconstruct her breasts. No implants. No molding of a boob from excess skin. Nothing. But as the fuzzy haze of anesthesia began to wear off, she realized he had completely disregarded what they had agreed upon—her body reshaped by a doctor while she was unconscious.”

An angered community is coming together in Facebook groups devoted to sharing the photos of the pockets of skin left against women’s will after mastectomies. Reporter Catherine Guthrie found surgeons making decisions against patients’ consent, stating they’re leaving the undesired flaps of skin “in case the patient changes their mind” about going flat. The trend points towards a medical culture in which women’s desire to go flat is challenged or outright ignored.  Bowles is now routinely protesting topless outside of the hospital where her surgery went wrong. Read about her amazing story in Cosmopolitan here.

Today on Overdose Awareness Day, a story of hope is building in Pittsburgh’s OD captiol of Carrick.

Self-described “recovering addict” and former drug dealer Gus DiRenna leads a prayer with a crew of people in recovery as they start work to turn a drug den in the neighborhood into a “Serenity House” for people working on their sobriety and starting a new chapter in their life. The process feeds into DiRenna’s simple formula: people in recovery need a decent room, a job and a community of support. “It just takes not talking at somebody, but reaching your hand out and helping them up, it gets them their hope,” said DiRenna. He opened up the home for a preview open house so that the community could see the transformation the space would make:

“He was facing cracked windows, crumbling plaster, a charred kitchen, a shower wall held together with tape … all the features you’d expect in a 117-year-old, five-bedroom house that ended up on the block watch’s list of drug hotspots. “See, when I look at this, I see opportunity, job training, kids making a little bit of money,” said Mr. DiRenna, recovery director of the ARK Allegheny Recovery Krew. “There’s going to be a lot of laughter and fun going on in here.”“

Read more here about the series of Serenity Houses DiRenna and his crew are building in their attempt to turn “OD Road” into “Recovery Road.”