An Eviction
While I feel as though I have lost a lot over the last six months, Saginaw has lost more, over many months, many years. People. Industry. Infrastructure. Last weekend, one family in Saginaw lost their home. The eviction happened on Friday, April 1st. On Friday, I drove by and saw an adult male standing beside the washer and dryer sitting at the side of the street. He was protecting them while he waited for someone to pick them up. I assume he was the owner of those appliances and a member of the family that was evicted.
The entire space between the street and the sidewalk was filled with stuff. Over the weekend, we drove by the house repeatedly. It is only a half a block from where we live, from the house where I grew up which is for the moment our safe haven. The pile of household and personal items was like a car wreck for me. I wanted to avert my eyes, but I could not. I stared at those personal belongings piled at the side of the road.
Mostly I watched the pile dwindle over a number of days. Last week, Emma and I walked by the house a number of times. She smelled everything sitting there. By the first day we walked by, most of the metal had been removed, picked up by scrappers. Anytime I put out anything for the trash that is metal or has metal in it, it is picked up before Waste Management comes on Tuesday morning. One of the efficiencies of poverty (what a horrible turn of phrase yet I think it is accurate) is transforming anything with value into money. Scrapping an example of this efficiency. Last week, the old hangers I set out, the kind on which you can hang four shirts or five pair of pants, we’re all snatched up within an hour of placing them at the side of the road. Metal was the first thing to go from the eviction pile.
The last time Emma and I walked by, there were mainly broken objects. A storage bin with a hole in the bottom. Some mismatched children’s socks, a princess castle, dirty and faded, a baseball bat, broken. There must have been at least two children who lived in the home, a boy and a girl. Two dresses were abandoned at the side of the road, and a mirror also broken.
The eviction so close to home made me sad. There is much in Saginaw that is sad. The bank branch of Second National Bank where I had my first saving account three blocks away is closed and abandoned. Second National Bank no longer exists, after multiple mergers, I do not even know what is its successor. The Kroger where we used to go grocery shopping is also an abandoned building. It is the store where my mother sent my sister for a Dove bar one day when she was feeling particular frustrated and at the end of her rope. Lara came back not with the delicious chocolate covered ice cream bar, but with a bar of soap. Both titled Dove. My mother was furious, then she laughed.
Miscommunication, loss, evictions, displacement, closure, migration away, unplanned returns. All of these circumstances a part of life. I hope the family who was evicted earlier this month has family or kin that can shelter them. I hope the parents are hugging their children extra tightly to reassure them that they are safe in the world, that there is space for them, even as the world repeatedly indicates otherwise. I hope they find stability soon in a new space. I am haunted by the plastic at the side of the road, by the dresser with missing drawers, by the toys and clothes, wet and frozen out on the curb. I want something better for those children, for their parents. I want something better for us all.
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