Nature Post #7: A Historical Nature

What degree of separation are we from the sources we are made from? 

Birmingham, I am nothing more than flesh and bone, than old pollution-breathing asthma. I am nothing more than a city girl wondering of my place here. 

I live in one of the most confusing parts of town. It is currently called Uptown. There is a sign at the edge of your body that sparkles Welcome to Uptown. On my street, Seneca, there is a mural. In the mural is embedded Soho, a previous name of the neighborhood. Tustin runs perpendicular to here. James Tustin: the reason why my neighborhood exists. 

It seems that Brits could never stop colonizing. James Tustin settled and began to build homes of English architecture and fruit orchards. He named us Soho. He gave me the mulberry tree that still stands and scatters fruit all through our grass and concrete that lives in the fences of our walls. This used to be the most beautiful place in the city. 1915.   The Post Gazette. 

Not a mere ten years later we stopped being beautiful. We were old and unattractive, we were populated now by the poor migrant mill workers, we were no longer a beautifully built nature.

How strong, how weak, are we?

My house is decaying. Still, we live. Our landlords are amicable enough: housemate/friend Thomas, and his parents. Good-natured Virginians. They’ve got this house and the one on Tustin. They fix us up the best they can. The roof leaks into my room, specifically on my bed. The ceiling in the bathroom is cracked all the way through from Hurricane Sandy rain. The woods and walls do not match, but they hold. They are not beautiful but we know where they came from, how they were built, rebuilt, painted, repainted, nailed, hammered, and solidified. We know where we came from.

The rooms that have closets are brick wall inside. There is nowhere to hide.

 No one knows us beyond Duquesne University and Mercy Hospital. Five blocks past. Ten blocks past. Here you are: Seneca. Tustin. People know Jumonville, where the buses turn up the hill to Fifth Avenue. It is the last stop light before Brady Street. 

We are a ghost town here, they say, since 1977 when it was official that the wealth moved out and urban renewal setbacks kicked in. It used to be hip here, used to be made of something solid like steel. But now, it is abandoned buildings, closed shops, dead/gray, brown, dark reds, and tans. This side of Uptown is riddled with parking lots used for the Consol Energy Center visitors, Downtown workers, and Oakland residents. 

But, here we are. Here we are Birmingham. We still climb the billboards, straddle the concrete of the Parkway Blvd of the Allies. We still party. We still act as if we’ve got a wild soul. We are not dead of nature. 

But what is nature, if not wild?

Just because we don’t look as welded together as the bridge, as concrete, iron, and steel, doesn’t mean we aren’t still standing. You see our gardens? You hear our records? Here we are. Brick. Concrete. Mulberries. Grass. Limestone. Here we are. Park and ride. 

I’m wondering Birmingham, what it is about you that makes me stand on you, feeling so at ease, feeling so alone, feeling like I’m about to escape, and still wanting to go back home?