Christina ~ May 1

 

I’m leaving the Big Y supermarket, driving up King Street toward Main Street, Elvis Presley singing about a woman who is always on his mind, and I feel the weight of tears, a heaviness behind my eyes. No, I didn’t want this, never wanted this, the supermarket with the wide aisles, the shopping carts in the parking lot, the auto dealerships and car washes, the isolated, sad hardware store, the coffee place plopped in the middle of all this hopeless ugliness, no, I never wanted this life. I never wanted to live in a place where I had to drive everywhere to do anything. My son says, But mom, you can walk down Main Street, and yes, there are restaurants and gift shops and banks on Main Street and yes I can walk down Main Street but I don’t really want to. Main Street in this small college town is full of drugged out young people, people who might have come to Pioneer Valley twenty years ago to go to college but who somehow dropped out, couldn’t pay the rent, decided living in the woods was a solution, begging on the street was a life. So yes, Northampton is a college town, Smith College is just a block from my very nice apartment in the 125 year old converted school house, a pretty town, a liberal town, but to me, a sad town and not where I want to be.