Leah Grady Sayvetz
It all started here, on this floor of hardwood tongue-and-groove boards, bought cheap from a building getting torn down. Here where the morning and noon sunlight beams through the giant window, the whole eastern wall of the room. Here in this small room which housed only one double bed and one small dresser. The bed, a mattress, bought new, sitting on a frame built for it from recycled lumber. The dresser, very old, and with its own story which creaks out a word at a time each time a drawer is opened or closed. Here with the old glass lamp sitting on the small dresser, a willowy pattern of leaves etched into the foggy glass. It all started here, where the big piece of mirror glass reflected my mom's rosy cheeks and big, full-moon balloon, pregnant belly. The mirror secured to the wall with two pieces of scrap wood and four screws. That mirror hides on the wall behind the door swung open. The door came from some place where it had swung into other rooms before, perhaps seen other babies born. I was born on the floor of this room, as my mother squatted next to that bed, the only brand-new thing in that little room besides me. Twenty-six years have changed the furniture here and covered the walls in artwork and photographs, marking my years growing up. Only just the other day did I finally leave.
====
Leslie Howe
My family and I moved to Orient, Long Island when I was in the second grade. My father had accepted an appointment on Plum Island — a few miles out in the Long Island Sound where animal research was done in order to keep foreign animal infectious diseases out of the United States.
We rented a a house in the middle of "town." Town consisted of two churches, a post office, a candy store called "The Idle Hour" (that must also have sold canned goods, soda, milk, bread, and tobacco), and a gas station that also provided mechanical work on every model of vehicle known to man back in the 1950s.
Orient had many farms. Potato farms were most prevalent. Fishing was a small industry there as well, but for other, larger industries, one had to travel inland to larger towns like Greenport, Southold, and Riverhead.
I attended a school that had two grades per classroom. Mine was grades two and three. I walked to school with my best friend, Sylvia Brooks. My phone number was 1109-R. We were on a party line. Everyone in Orient knew everyone else's business! I knew that my brother, Neil, age 9 1/2 when I was 6, liked Donna Latham better than her twin sister, Rosemary. When I told that information to others, I got into deep trouble at home.
Our house was located right next to the firehouse so every day at noon, when the fire siren sounded, we were deafened by the sound and all conversation was stopped due to the loud noise. If there was a fire or an accident in the middle of the night, we all woke up abruptly to that loud siren right next door.
It was really nice spending a few years living in the quaint little village at the tip of Long Island where everyone seemed to know everyone else, crime was nonexistent, and the salty sea air was filled was sounds of sea gulls and ocean waves lapping the shore amidst the reeds and sandy seashells.
====
Nancy Osborn
Where my story begins — the story of how I wanted to live my life and how I have finally done so for almost half of it — that story began in the small upstate village of Liverpool, on Onondaga Lake.
At the time it was still a village, not just an extension of the Carousel Mall. It was a small town, separated from Syracuse by undeveloped land along the lake. It was a journey to travel to Syracuse, past the Salt Museum, past the French Fort, a journey past ugly oil tanks, and a disgustingly stinky garbage dump at the end of the lake. I always hated having to leave Liverpool to go see my parents' friends in the city of Syracuse.
I would have been content to stay at home on our tree-shaded street, playing with the neighbor kids, or roller-skating down our block or chasing rabbits in the park by the lake.
Ever since we moved away from Liverpool to the quintessential suburb outside Chicago and then to other suburbs in Western New York, I had longed for my parents to pick another small town to live in, but they never did.
So it fell to me, after many unhappy years in Buffalo and Boston, where I learned once again what I always knew, that I was not meant to live in big cities - it fell to me to find that small town for myself, to continue my story that began 65 years ago on 4th Street in Liverpool.
====
Olivia Royale
My story begins in a place where the cops killin' don’t exactly make the news. i credit my hardness to my home town and i never tell folks the name of it. i don’t remember much from childhood. But in my teenage years, my hometown was a badge, i wore on my leather jacket. i often looked at the dirt, and the poor people, and used it to inflict pain. i lived in “the next town over” from the high school I went to. It was an all white school and my first lesson in privilege. i drove my sister’s boyfriend's car when I was 15 because no one in my family could drive me. i parked in the seniors lot. i always flipped off anyone who challenged me for it — don’t those kids know where i come from? most of my friends didn’t come to my house but lucky for me my folks worked all the time and no one was home to tell me what to do. when i finally got my license i picked up a girl i worked with, Yaz, who was from the Dominican Republic and lived in the worst neighborhood in town. i drove to pick her up and when we pulled away from the curb she told me: “Don’t make eye contact with anyone.” When i got out i spent a few years traveling around. i tried all those cool towns you were suppose to move to. i think about my hometown a lot, ‘specially when I am noticing that privilege. i always move to the dirtier parts of town after that. i wanna stay true to that hardness. i was one of the lucky ones, i got out. i owe it to my hometown to defend the dirt, and those poor folks. And level out all the differences.
====
Sara Robbins
Poughkeepsie, New York is a small city with a strange name situated on the Hudson River, 60 miles north of New York City. I was born there at St. Francis Hospital where my father, a doctor, delivered me, because the doctor who was supposed to deliver me was late.
I went home with my parents to live on the upper floors of an old Victorian house which housed my father's office on the first floor. It was in downtown Po'town (my nickname for my hometown) on Church Street, where many beautiful old homes stood.
When I was six months old, my mother, father, older brother, sister, and I all moved to a big country house on two acres, at the top of Brickyard Hill on Dutchess Turnpike. Over the years this house was remodeled and given an early '60s look. A real soda fountain/bar was installed off the huge family room. A regulation-sized pool table and a pinball bowling machine and another bar were installed in the very large basement. A 20x40 foot pool was installed on the front lawn with an extra bouncy diving board and a tall curved slide. There was a field where my father had a garden. He loved to grow tomatoes and at night in the summer we would have "me me" parties where we ate ripe tomato sandwiches on white bread with mayo and salt — the three of us kids yelling "me me" when asked who wants one? Daddy was proud of those tomatoes. Eventually he had a three-car garage erected next to the garden site.
Our home was different from anyone else's. We had a live-in maid whose little suite — bedroom, bathroom, and living room — was upstairs. My father loved music and technology and he had a stereo system installed that played music in three rooms, plus out by the pool. He even had a phone jack installed by the pool so he could always receive calls.
