Roots

I was born in 1974 in a small town in mid Michigan. This town was split in half by a set of train tracks. On one side of the tracks was the nicer side of town. Well kept old Victorian houses, the library, and clean streets were common place. The other side of the tracks had a more worn, weathered, and tired look to it. I spent the first 3 years of my life living with my mom and my Aunt Joyce. My mom worked a third shift job at a factory that made wiring harness for General Motors products and my Aunt Joyce babysat me. We lived in a house on a broken brick road next to a factory that had been divided into apartments. We were in the lower right hand furnished apartment (if you were facing the house) that cost $25 a month. My Aunt Joyce received a weekly $20 check from social services for babysitting me, and my mom brought home her paycheck which, after bills, left $75 everything else.

I have included a picture of that house that was taken a couple of years ago. It has been remodeled recently but I remember how it used to look. It was covered with gray asphalt shingles which made it look dirty even on the freshest spring day and it had a front porch on it that sagged like any of the hundreds of tired hobo’s that used to pass through the town riding the rails. Inside the furnace had a crack in the side wide enough to stick your thumb into and when it rained water would run down the light cord and drip of the light bulb in the main room. The house was a couple of hundred feet away from a set of train tracks and when there weren’t trains there were trucks going to the factory to load or unload in addition to the employees changing shifts.

But for all the previous description, I visualize this time with some fondness because I’ve been told stories of good times in that house. It sounded as though everyone living there was interested in each others well being. Plus it was home to the first images I have of the man who married my Mom and adopted me as his son when I was three. I have always referred to this place as “The Broken House” because that was what I called it when I was young. However, I am proud, grateful and lucky to be able to say that, though I started life in a broken house, I never lived in a broken home.