27 June 2007

back to my roots

I grew up in the city, once we moved back to Michigan from Liberia. We lived in the kind of neighborhood where the community center offers free lunch in the summer because most of the kids in the neighborhood get free lunch at school and might not eat in the summer, otherwise. We lived in the kind of neighborhood where a girl who had been beaten up by drug dealers two streets over knocked on our door at 4 a.m. because ours was the only light on - my dad is diabetic and had gotten up to get something to eat. My brother got beaten up in our yard. We had to design a lock for the basketball hoop. Some of my sister's friends weren't allowed to spend the night there because it was too dangerous. That kind of neighborhood. I loved it.

My parents don't live there anymore. The year I graduated from college, they moved to a neighborhood that I like to describe as Boring, U.S.A. Today I went on a rant about how those frosted, elaborate door panels in ugly flowers and shapes do not actually make your little vinyl-sided basic ranch house look more expensive. They just make it look mismatched.

Vinyl (bland) + frosted door panels (attempt at (cheap) luxury) = hideous.

That's the kind of neighborhood this one is. I, who have no sense of style, could do it better. But anyway, it's in the middle of cornfields, this neighborhood (because why leave a perfectly good cornfield as corn! Let's put up little ranch houses with no trees around them! They can roast in the summer and require ridiculous amounts of energy to cool with the central air that everyone will be using because there is no shade! Not that I'm bitter.)

We live in this suburban, safe, nightmare now, but somewhere back there, on my mom's side, were farmers. My mom's dad, Pops, used to have a big garden in which, every summer, my mom would force us to labor for hours, picking strawberries, picking beans, picking... okay, all I remember is strawberries and beans. Anyway, for a girl who grew up in: 1. Liberia, and 2. the inner city, I find it hilarious that my mom and I frequently have the following conversation (parts are interchangeable):

Person 1: Corn's looking good this year.
Person 2: Yeah, it's nice and tall. Already more than knee-high. By the 4th, it will be shoulder high.
1: Assuming we get rain. It's looking a bit dry.
2: Yeah, it really needs to rain soon. It's looking good, but it's definitely dry.
1: I hope it rains soon, for the farmers. That corn needs some rain to keep it growing.

Who are these people? We should be wearing overalls and chewing on straw standing at the edge of the field. And we keep having this conversation over and over. Hopefully we can stop, because it finally rained today.

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