It's easy to do, for lots of reasons—the contempt bred of familiarity, the strip malls that have changed the landscape and belligerently suggest that no beauty is to be found here, move along; we killed it, the thin veneer of dilapidation that sometimes seems to hang over everything, because we are a place of abandonment and stagnation, the survivors of a two decades-old economic cataclysm when the steel mills fell. They were lumbering giants who swallowed thousands, almost all men, 'round the clock, every day in three shifts, permanently dirtying their lungs and their fingernails—and no number of Wal-Marts can fill the void those giants left.
And so there is disrepair, the indications of atrophy. They are subtle things, that have happened slowly over decades. The schools and their playgrounds look less bright, somehow failing to suggest a place vibrating with energy and promise, the way they seemed to do when I was a kid. The streets aren't quite as clean. The potholes and the cracked sidewalks don't get fixed as quickly, or at all. Fewer salt trucks in the winter. More houses every year that need fresh paint, more vacant retail spaces. Little things. Little degrees of difference. Little signs that the good jobs are gone, that the salaries at the jobs which remain aren't keeping up with inflation, that local government is broke, that they can't afford real improvements, only layers of temporary fixes to stave off the rot as long as possible.
Everyone who wants something better moves away, just like I did once. And stayed gone for a decade.
This place is a haunted place, its history hanging over everything like cobwebs that can't quite be brushed away.
And yet, when I take a moment to really look, I see there is beauty to be found even in the decline.
There is beauty in decline. There is humor in tragedy. Maybe there is hope here, too, in this place very much like lots of places in this country, in this world.
I need to remember I live in a beautiful place.
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