After a year in New York City, where the claustrophobia was so oppressive that I sometimes snuck out into the hallway to beat on the plywood screwed onto the roof hatch, my husband and I moved to a small village in Ohio.
Yellow Springs is a town you may have heard of, in spite of its population of only a few thousand; the hometown of Dave Chappelle , a liberal enclave filled with older radicals and young free-spirit entrepreneurs, it is bounded by farms and parks.
The Tecumseh Land Trust, a sort of demilitarized zone whose maintenance keeps strip malls and chain stores at bay, insures a level of charm annihilated by an influx of big box stores in neighboring towns. It is bounded on another side by Glen Helen, a small nature preserve with winding trails leading over a waterfall and a modest center for the rehabilitation of injured birds of prey.
Our downtown consists of a few restaurants, a few coffee joints, a number of shops devoted to the functional and ornamental artwork of locals, a movie theater, and a local grocery. This was an awkward posture for usโneither a cold nor an overly affectionate coupleโand after a while, we ended up standing apart but close, as the rattle of gun shots down the block shuddered through the air.
I came from a neighborhood where SWAT raids, random gunfire, and despair were not uncommon. One morning, I woke to the train whistle, more insistent than usual. A block away, a man had simply sat down on the tracks and waited. The rails were awash in blood by the time I was going to school, a fine spray over the rocks in the cess. He dug it out of the wall and displayed it next to the pennies he and my mother crush on the train tracks.
