11 Comments
founding

I love that "I Have a Small Heart" so much. Thank you. I think about pilgrimages all the time. I make them, of various kinds, whenever I can, but not enough lately. The last two years I've told myself I am going to walk to the Buddha Garden in Arlee from my front doorstep, up and over Mill Creek on the north edge of Frenchtown. This will be the year.

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A small ghost city story...

When we moved back to Little Rock, we purchased a home in a part of town that is generally not regarded as super nice but is, in fact, my favorite neighborhood that I've ever lived in. You can walk to neighborhood bars and restaurants very easily, there are tons of trees and dogs and neighborhood cats (both mean and nice), and when the world shut down last March you could hear birds singing every second of the day (a rarity in a city of 300,000 souls). We bought the house in May of 2017. One of the things we loved was seeing the neighborhood kiddos walking to their neighborhood school (Woodruff Elementary and Pre-K) and then going next door to the Boys and Girls Club to play games and sports. In between May and August - when we moved in - the school district sold the building off to a Miami-based real estate developer who wanted to convert it into high-dollar apartments (aka brat castles) that would service the medical school nearby. The developer soon realized that he couldn't convert the HVAC system into something usable, so he began trying to offload the place. It's sat vacant since July of 2017. The little children are bussed all over Little Rock. We may not have empty cities, but we sure as hell have empty neighborhoods.

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Mar 23, 2021Liked by Antonia Malchik

You can't visit the wilderness; you can only imagine it.

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Mar 23, 2021Liked by Antonia Malchik

Isn't it odd that we usually insist on positioning our troubles between us and our happiness?

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