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urban girl in the country


green in concrete
For the last lot-of-years I’ve lived in urban areas.  I’ve become a city girl with hints of a flower child mixed with hipster nuances…translated I like to wear skinny jeans.  This is the total opposite of how I grew up, which was on a farm. 

My paternal grandparents grew, raised, caught and hunted for everything they ate – radical organic, free-range stuff.  On my Mom’s side of the fam tree, there were green grocers and orchard growers.  Heck, I was in 4-H raising feeder calves and a small flock of wooly sheep.  Gardens, canning, freezing and preserving everything was the ordinary.

I carried on the gardening-preserving, saving the spoils piece, until I found myself in fresh veggie-at-a-farmer’s-market heaven!  The foreign city I found myself in had a temperate climate where fruit and vegetables could be grown year ‘round, and … it was sold at a giant open air market every week.  Yippee!  I no longer needed to squirrel away for winter; it was there in crates and baskets.

Ooops, this post about the city has gone down the road of food…but what a divine sidetrack. 

i love the city

Urbanity has bustle and busyness, diversity of people and culture, food, neighborhood personalities, the architecture, parks and the closeness of living in proximity.  Sounds irrational to adore urbanity, but I do. While my heart is all pitter-pattering, there is a dark side to this infatuation, too; hunger, pain, abuse, homelessness and crime.  It’s a place of rampant brokenness, which stabs a pang in my heart.

urbanity
concrete and steel lace the landscape
                                                                factories living and abandoned populate the forest
worker ants trudge to and fro – for what?
suits and heels stride blindly ignoring
                                crippled guy is propped by a decaying building
                                                                                                                                paper bag, comfort in hand
smoke belches from pipes and stacks, spewing debris
little gal stands on a street corner, eyes vacant
                                                                crumbling lives, like so many buildings – in ruins
middle-aged couple, sign clad, begging for food
                                                                                for themselves, for their dog
eyes never meet, it’s too risky
                                                furtive glances and blank stares, the order of the day
safer that way, don’t let them know
tuck away the need, desperate cries
concrete and steel has laced our hearts – tightly


I now find myself uprooted and placed in the country.  Even though some wouldn’t consider my new digs country, I do.  For example, we were driving down a back road a couple of weeks ago and saw a dead, frozen cow in the back of a beat-up pick-up truck.  Poor cow’s legs were sticking straight up with a more than ample belly hanging out.  Not too much dignity there.  Certainly the scene was not what you’d see in the city; proving my country point.  I should’ve snapped a picture with my phone, but I was too busy being flabbergasted. 

Dead cows set aside, there seems to be some reappearing pitter-patters and pangs from my heart in the country that appeared in the city.  Sure, there’s good, fresh food, neighborhood personalities and parks, but fragmented, damaged lives are no respecter of the city limits.  Cardboard signs and hungry bellies dot the streets; suits and heels disguise their desperate, vacant cries to keep up the appearance.

maybe, it's not about a place, but a condition.

I'm just a girl with her own cardboard sign and  a desperate heart…

Missy


If you have been mildly amused, challenged or inspired by what you have read, please pass on my blog to a friend, colleague, family member or even random acquaintance






Comments

  1. I'm just a girl with her own cardboard sign and a desperate heart…
    I'd like to hear more about that sentence.

    You expressed the contrast so well. I too love the city but see the downside of it. I also love the country, but not the isolation of it. I love how you wrote the middle part. I don't know what you'd call that style but it's interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Marlene. I'm glad the sentence left you hanging. Isn't that one of the things Pat taught in our writing class? Make people want to read more? Are you taking the class this term? If so, please tell everyone "hi" from me.

    The middle was a poem that I decided to kind of deconstruct. For some reason, I like how it feels that way.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I like your use of varying sized typefaces to suggest the bombardment of messages in an urban environment, as well as your sense of dislocation as an uprooted rural woman coming to the city.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, Eric. I know I saw this on LinkedIn, but it's always nice to give a public shout out. I appreciate you reading and taking time to post a comment.

    ReplyDelete
  5. No problem. I think I should look into Word Press. My first blog was on "Blogger?" Or Blogspot. I forget. But gradually I just did a "journal" on my two websites and kept them going once a week for a while. And I did a blog on Goodreads. Now I just do the Linked In Pulse. But now that I am about to publish my novel, I am conserving and concentrating my energies for that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It does take time to keep up with writing ... good to conserve the energy for what's important at this point in time. What's your novel about?

      Delete
  6. It's about a young Peace Corps volunteer in North Africa, Tunisia to be precise. Thanks for asking.

    ReplyDelete

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