By Shannon Penrod
It snowed yesterday. That may not seem like a very big deal to most of the world, but I live in Southern California, in the Northern suburbs of Los Angeles. Snow here is the equivalent of frogs raining from the sky in Alabama; we’ve all heard that it’s happened before but seeing it in your life time…well, it’s nothing short of miraculous. We’re not talking flurries, it snowed, as in I needed a shovel to get down my stairs last night. I didn’t have one. No one in Southern California owns a shovel, they don’t even sell them here.
The thing that was truly amazing was the way my neighbors reacted. My family recently moved to an apartment complex that can only be described as the United Nations meets economic downturn. This is the apartment complex that no one aspires to live in. It’s not horrible, don’t get me wrong, but it is transient. This is the place you rent when you have no where else to go on short notice, the leases are 10 month because no one plans on staying. At one time I think it was meant for people who were waiting for their newly built houses to be completed, now it is the stop off for those of us affected by foreclosure.
I remember house shopping with my husband six years ago. The market was insane, homes were so expensive that even a small shack in the suburbs of Los Angeles was a cool half a million dollars. We had a new baby. Neither of us saw how it could work so we continued to rent. Shortly after that our son was diagnosed with Autism and all thought of buying a home was gone. In a weird way it was a blessing, we would have bought on the bubble and been in huge trouble; instead we rented. No foreclosure issues for us, right? I can hear God laughing in the background. We have had to move twice in the last year because we have had two landlords lose their homes to foreclosure. That is how we have come to live in the land of international foreclosure.
As I walk through our apartment complex I am treated to multicultural sounds and smells of families trying to recover from this economic disaster. I hear Spanish, French, Russian, Cantonese and even a little English as people enter and exit their apartments and I catch wafts of exotic spices and aromatic sauces cooking at meal times but that is the extent of the interaction here at the U.N. No one talks to anyone else, and they certainly don’t talk to me or my family. It is an unspoken rule that I didn’t pick up on when we moved in. I said, “Hello!” to everyone I passed. They put their heads down and kept walking. I took my son to the nearby doors where we had seen children playing. We knocked and introduced ourselves. We were not greeted with smiles. There was a language barrier certainly, but we were treated to shaking heads while doors were politely closed.
I haven’t given up, I continue to say “Hi!” when we pass neighbors, occasionally I get a smile or a head nod. No words. Never any words.
And then yesterday it snowed. My son and I threw on sweatshirts and jackets and flew outside to see the wonderous event…only to find that it had created another wonderous event, the entire U.N. had come out to play! My neighbors were laughing and throwing snow, and smiling….and yes talking. I won’t lie and say that there was full on conversation, it was too much like the tower of Babble for that…but there was communication. People were making eye contact and shaking their heads in wonder. It was as if we were allowed to commune over this miraculous experience.
The snow was amazing, so very out of context amongst the palm trees and the open swimming pool, but what it brought was so much more powerful. It reminded us all for a few moments that we are all human, that cultures and skin colors and languages and even economic failure can’t separate us. It was a miraculous snow.
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