Part 2

I do not tell people whom I meet the story. Many people have asked me in polite conversation how I came to North Carolina. I, yet another Yankee, who ventured past the Mason-Dixon line to settle into a life of affordable housing, lower taxes, and warmer weather. I answer the question, with a wry smile and say it was just a change of scenery. Charlotte is the Promised Land of vinyl-sided subdivision and drive-thru Starbucks. I do not tell them that when I moved here into a two-bedroom apartment in South Charlotte, how I cried when I realized for the first time that, indeed, there could be two McDonald’s on one road, or two Wal-Marts, or two anythings that could exist in the myriad of shopping centers that polluted the southern part of the city. I was used to simplicity. Places like this did exist up North, but I had managed to avoid them. I grew up in a small, middle class city in Massachusetts. It is a city that had been built on the furniture industry and, like many cities in New England, resembled more of a town. We only had one Wal-Mart, which existed outside the city limits.