User talk:Stephensmith

For Christmas I visited the old homeland, the former territory of Westavia, where my parents still live. I took a short walk to see what had changed in the area and what was still the same. Although the big drainage ditches have been shored up with rocks and netting (to keep the rocks from sliding down), and also had many of their bends and other irregularities straightened out, I was pleased to see that the small drainage ditch near our old house was about the same as it was when I was a youngster playing in it. It is a shallow, concrete-lined waterway that harbors minnows and crawfish (at least I assume it still does). The one somewhat disturbing change was that the cement tunnel running beneath Ralston Road, connecting the small drainage ditch with one of the large ones, had some gang grafitti painted inside it. But you had to get down practically inside the tunnel to see it. The patch of weeds growing beneath the nearby power lines looked exactly as they did when I lived there -- same type of plants, same dense growth. We used to blaze trails through those weeds, creating "secret" paths between my friends' houses. Ah, nostalgia.