a Fond Farewell...

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When I posted the little story "Home Sweet Home" neary two years ago I was finding our sweet little neighborhood in the budding stages of a vast and sweeping transition. I wanted to capture it, as I had come to know and love it, so that I would not forget what it had once been. It was unlikely - to say the very least. It was ideal - for a time. It was like nothing that I have ever before or will ever again experience in this lifetime and I am so grateful for the opportunity to have lived this chapter of my life in this particular time and unlikely place.

A couple of years ago I felt the wind shift. First just a light breeze and then the rumblings of an impending storm that led us to know that we must leave for good. We were nearly two years coming to terms with the idea leaving and then actually moving away. I understand now what made the wind shift - the politics, the economics, the cultural overtones of it. And I understand what created the happy little bubble that I existed in for a time. It was a bubble indeed but it was an interesting glimpse of how life could be beautiful in the least likely of places and circumstances. It had potential.

Sadly, the neighborhood I left no longer felt safe or happy. A three week old baby shot and murdered because the new, young father couldn't afford to pay the local gang $25 protection money to be on the sidewalk just two blocks from my home. Knife fights and murders between home and the grocery store, home and post office. Impatience, intolerance, and exasperation abound. It was time to leave but I want to remember it as the time that it had been for nearly eight years - a beautiful, unexpected, "Home Sweet Home".