No, we aren’t afraid of our new-to-us neighborhood
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- March 17, 2024
- 1882
We have a “catio” at our house. So nicknamed by my friend Leslie, who after we supped on delicious fish last Friday at St. Joe’s, stopped by the house with her husband for wine and a house tour.
Our bathroom has a door that leads to a little porch that is no good at all for sitting as it’s just roofing. But the cats, they’ve taken to going out there and sunning themselves after they realized we weren’t going to let them out the front door into a strange neighborhood.
“It’s a catio instead of a patio,” she said.
And yes, yes it is. They were indoor/outdoor cats their whole lives, and this seems to be doing the trick, scratching the itch, hitting that good spot. I love to see them out there turning their face to the sun, closing their eyes as it sweeps over them.
The other day I opened the catio door and heard a pounding bass. I walked out and surveyed the neighborhood, stopping at a house one street over with work vans parked in front of it. The bass kept pounding in a familiar beat, one I’d heard many times on my husband’s playlists as well as ones in Mexico. Then I smiled because I knew I’d found one of the Latino homes in the neighborhood.
I will now look at this house every time I’m upstairs, see who comes and goes, ticking boxes in my head of who lives where. I’m loving being part of a big neighborhood, the outlines of each home becoming recognizable in my day to day, the people that walk by lifting a hand in greeting.
I do find it interesting the amount of people who’ve asked me if we’re not afraid to live in Canton. It kind of stops me in my tracks, a punch to the gut if you will. It also has me recall the times I’ve been asked the same question about traveling to Mexico.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll be kidnapped or hurt?” people would ask, a small nervousness in their eyes. What surprised me more is it was asked of a city 45 short minutes away.
I know there were many that looked up our address to make sure we hadn’t moved into the “bad” section of Canton and didn’t realize it — even after stating we’d been looking for years, creeping up and down neighborhoods every weekend.
What is the bad section of town? A place where faces look different than ours? Live different than we do? A place where we lock our car doors at night?
I’m not a fan of generalizing an area, but I’m chuckling now after moving here for almost two months. Someone that lives in Canton said this, “You’re going to love living here. Everything is accessible and at your fingertips. On the weekends the people come up from other counties to eat and shop, then they go home.”
I realize I was one of those people. We came here to go out: eat, shop, see a movie. Now we’re part of a community, and little areas of delineation are popping out. We live in Westbrook. Edmeyer Park is just north of us, and Harter Heights is west of us. I’ve enveloped “The Party Place” as my local convenience store stop and am cutting coupons for my local Giant Eagle. My friend who moved here the same time as us lives in Market Heights — an area in North Canton. I don’t know everything about our area yet, but I plan to — without fear.
George has taken to calling our cats city slickers, moving from a large rural area to a very small metropolis. Sounds are different here, and they are absorbing them one by one so they don’t startle as they happen, just like us — the trash men that rumble through the streets grabbing trash by hand on Tuesdays, the birdsong that still comes through but is different, the fat gray squirrels that play in the empty lot beside us, the sunbeams that land different inside our space. They’re adapting to their environment — a new one they didn’t choose but that their humans did. Together we’re making it work as we survey the layout of our new lives.
Melissa Herrera is a published author and opinion columnist. She is a curator of vintage mugs and all things spooky, and her book, “TOÑO LIVES,” can be found at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives. For inquiries, to purchase her book or anything else on your mind, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com or find her in the thrift aisles.