Friday, September 10, 2010

This Hard Line Symmetry of People and Pets

There are 2 "towns" about 10 miles from our house, that we never go to.  They are so small that they don't have any proper grocery stores or services, so there is no reason for us to go.  We drove through both of them once, soon after we moved here, and one of them showed such poverty and appearance of being populated by drug addicts, that it made my chest hurt.  The other one seemed old and quaint, kind of cute, kind of not, and after that we never went back.

Until recently.  DH thought it might be a fun experiment to eat at restaurants in town #2.  (I'm not sure town #1 has any.)  (I am not naming either town so that I can avoid the type of hate mail I receive on my You Tube account after I post videos of sad Oregon places.)  So we drove through, and found 4 restaurants, if you will.  It was more like one restaurant and 3 other establishments that appear to serve prepared food.  In the last week or so we have eaten at 2 of them.  The actual restaurant, which I would not recommend, and a pizza place, which I would.  I'm actually very happy at the thought of returning to the pizza place. 

After our pizza, it was still light out, so we decided to drive around the residential streets and check out the houses.  That is when the town stopped being kind of quaint and started looking like a town of sort of shocking poverty.  House after house that needed to be demolished was being lived in.  Large old houses that were converted into slum apartments.  Mold on the outside of the house that made me wonder what the inside of the house must smell like.  But I can tell, from the mold on the sheets that are being used as curtains.

On top of a hill were new construction tract homes called "The Heights" (of course, don't all towns have The Heights?).  There were only about 7 houses, and at least 2 were still unsold.  The view from the top of the hill was looking down on so many shacks hidden by tall grass.

One oddly charming thing about the town was the abundance of cats.  Cute fluffy cats.  Every house seemed to have an outdoor cat as a pet.  So as we drove by house, house, house we saw cat, cat, cat.  And on one street, deer, deer, deers.  Brazenly standing right in people's front yards eating the flowers in broad daylight.

Just in case I had misunderstood the poverty level, I relayed the story to Babysitter this morning, and she confirmed that the homes are so bad that they need to be demolished, not renovated, but that I shouldn't feel sorry for them because everyone is on drugs.

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