Poverty

It snowed here again.  Winter is lingering, and my soul is rejecting this ongoing plunge into dying.  The worst of it:  the undying optimism inside my soul that says that things will get better, things will get warmer, which dies daily as soon as I check the weather and see that the there will be no hope for sun or warmth - at least not in any near future that meteorogolists can see.

I did see the sun today, but it was humiliated and veiled, cloaked by smoky clouds.  I saw it at the end of my journey back from Hopkinsville, KY - the place where they mark two torturous events in our nation's history:  a woeful stopping point on The Trail of Tears and the forming place for Jefferson Davis.  I don't think it harsh to call it a miserable place, although I know that is a terrible thing to say of any place.

All of today is amounting to a picture of poverty in my mind.  And, I am ashamed and afraid of that image, as though I have to explain it to my friends or - worse - acknowledge that maybe my life is impoverished.  

I saw a whole living room of garbage upon someone's lawn this afternoon.  Not in Hopkinsville, I am afraid ... in my town, in Owensboro.  The snow was spitting crosswise upon the heap of some family's mismanagement and reckless abandonment.  I hated it.  

Daily I see a town deeply imbedded in poverty - the likes I have not known since the earliest of my own days.  It calls up in my mind the old lumber yard I once knew on 9th street, a voidless realm of emptiness - a building full of ghostly vacating.  Life left it.  I feel like that is what is happening to this land that I now know, not just one building here or one building there, but the whole of the countryside and even the inner core of Owensboro.

The tallest building - perhaps - in Owensboro is a cylinder shaped hotel that has come into disrepair.  It was the beacon of a new Owensboro that never found any compatriots.  It stepped out in a city where many are chiefly concerned about staying in.

Someone recently bought it for under $250,000 - hoping to turn a profit on it somehow.  They will not.  The building is dead and needs to be leveled.  But, instead it stands as a humiliating reminder that there was a time when this city was poised to move forward with our country, and it did not.

Perhaps I sound condemning.  I'm not trying to be.  I'm trying to speak to what I am discovering it means to live where there are more worries about a city dying than there are about dealing with overcrowding and crime.  

I am not immune from it, and that is why it bothers me.  That is part of what it has meant to call this place home for me.  I know there is poverty here.  And what I mean by that is an absence of nourishing, enriching streams that feed a people.  Call it hubris if you'd like - a sense that I know what this community needs when I have not been here long.  But, I don't think that's true.   

Time may tell.  Time will tell.

Wes