Bringing life to black and white

I'm experimenting with toning in black and white images. One of the best bits of post-processing advice I've heard is to apply an effect slowly until it is just noticed, then back off slightly. This seems to add warmth and life to my black and white conversions that, until this point, have seemed very cold and boring. The image is still grayscale, yet not void of color...if that makes sense.

These photos are from a recent walk around our neighborhood. At a high level there is nothing particularly striking about a suburban scene, but if you can remember to walk more slowly you discover that texture and pattern are everywhere, even in man-made suburbia. One of the best ways to discover this is to walk with children, who are not in a hurry and who do not pay attention to the same things that adults do. "What's that ladder on the road?" "This is bumpy." We trample right by and over these things all the time.

So much for Easy Street

I live on the border of suburbia. Not quite a city boy, not quite a country boy. Granted, I work in the big city, but the place I call home is quite literally on the fringe of suburbia. If I had a north window and you looked out of it, you would see town homes, houses, traffic, and construction sites. If you look out the south window, you see farm land and a few scattered houses. Now that I think about it, my childhood home was the same way. To the east was the grand city of Faribault. To the west, the country.

Can someone be drawn to such divides...not just the geographical, but the social and political and the spiritual? Is it possible that the chemistry and spirit that make up my body and soul were melded in such a fashion that I do not plant my foot on either mountain, but rather, settle in the valley between?

I suppose things are not always so in-between, but it's interesting how the things we were often so sure of as a child--our good friends, our ability to trust blindly, what we like, what we are good at, what we want to be when we grew up--often turn out a little fuzzy as adults. Does growing wiser really require that our ability to so easily choose must be sacrificed? Or is it a sign an opening mind?