When I lived in the city, I could tell time by the noise from the street. Rattling school buses meant it was going on 8 in the morning. At 10 a.m., the Presbyterian church bells rang. The Catholic church bells rang at noon. At 1 p.m. there were kids playing outside the school next door. At 3, the buses were back.

Four years ago, I moved to a blue-collar suburb, built to house workers at Union Switch and Signal and Westinghouse Air Brake.

I moved in October, when the street was quiet. I heard children on their way to school, a little before 8 in the morning. A little after 3 in the afternoon, I heard them coming home again.

Then summer came -- and the noise was sometimes deafening.

The minute the weather began to get warm, the street was full of kids, shouting, playing and trying new tricks on scooters, bikes or skateboards. Drivers coming through here had to dodge a homemade skateboard ramp in the middle of the street.

Then there were the fireworks: BANG! SNAP! WHIZZ! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The dollar stores sell them. The supermarket sells them. Kmart sells them. The kids aren't supposed to buy them unless they're 18, but somehow they managed to keep themselves supplied from the middle of June to the middle of July. Crackers and cherry bombs in the daytime, bottle rockets and fountains when the sun went down.

Last year we stood in the street to watch them shooting off all around us, as though the sky had caught fire.

This year my street is quiet. The kids are gone.

The twin girls who played jump rope on the corner have been gone since early spring. Their mother's home has been foreclosed. The papers are fading on the front porch.

The kids down the street who played kickball are gone, too. Their families put the keys in the payment envelope and found someplace else to live. The front yards are a forest of weeds.

The little boy who used to ride his skateboard like a luge sled down the hill in front my house lives up the hill now, just a block away from where his family owned a home.

Empty windows and weedy yards. Homes on my street are becoming mere buildings again.

There are still plenty of people living here. Most of them are older couples. Their homes were paid off years ago. Some evenings I hear grandchildren.

But the old man who had the giant "Support Our Troops" sign, with a picture of the Statue of Liberty on it ($14.95 at Kmart), is gone, along with his sign.

There was a shooting on the street in May. Some kid in a white sedan and another on foot, who ran off toward the railroad tracks as we all called the police.

They came, as the police do, long after the criminals had left, and searched the street with flashlights for something they never found.

People here were shocked. Shootings are something that happens in the city, not out here.

The children who still live on my street are staying inside. Just in case there's a gang war going on.

This summer sounds like winter, as we hide in our homes waiting for better times.