racism

Since pixels don’t come with smell-o-vision, I must tell you that these words are being typed in a quiet house that smells of fresh salsa and roasting bell peppers.  The laptop (old, beaten up) is positioned so as to block out the setting sun, which does not come directly through my front door but close enough to force my pupils to readjust.  I have a small party to be at in an hour’s time.  I must not be late, so I must write fast and speak rightly the first time.

The place, now: Huntsville, Alabama.
The place, then: rural Arkansas.

I was a child of the late 1970s, whose memories just missed Jimmy Carter but remembered Reagan dimly through an apolitical child’s eye.  Those who read this site know my story well; I came from a union family in a former mining town.  My tiny hometown, well under three hundred souls at the time, all looked like me because they were almost all related to me.