Rhees

hi, I'd like to order a pizza.

There is not much to Paulding, but there is corn. There is a courthouse in the center of town and there are around three thousand or so people living out and around it. Go out east twenty minutes and you’ll arrive in my home of Oakwood where the air smells stale and there is a restaurant with a door that has a fresh coat of purple paint.

Driving into Oakwood is like walking into a space where time stops and you have been transported back to the 1970s there are little houses and belligerent six-year-olds riding their bikes. Everyone knows where the crack houses are except for me because they all look the same; there’s one with these pretty cobblestone walls that look lovely but other than that they all blur together. Everyone’s garage door is open you can see the trash and the chairs.

When I wake up and go outside the air smells wet and musty. There’s water vapor rising over my pond; it looks like there is ice all over but it’s only just past the middle of September. Fifty degrees in the morning, eighty degrees in the afternoon when I’m leaving school. My school smells like mud and circles.

My mother works at a grocery store that doesn’t sell bagels. The same people come in every day at the same time. If you make more than thirty thousand dollars in Oakwood you are wealthy and you are a celebrity. Most of the people who have enough money to leave eventually do. My mother lived in Washington and Hawaii and Connecticut and California but she wanted to come home to this town where the ground is stale and the water looks like sewage but this is her home and she tells me she loves it but her eyes and her back pain tell me something else.

Reviews

[alanwgraham]

You've painted an honest and depressing portrait of this run down town. Yet for your mother it was home and people are like that. The familiar is very comforting.
Well done for your story.
Alan