CL Pauwels at Large

By Nancy Schatz Alton

Last night I walked through the smoke, face mask on. I walked through the smoke with my friend of 30 years. I walked through the smoke through a neighborhood transformed by money. I didn’t think about gentrification, that word I learned at college. Instead I thought about how I didn’t know where I was because the buildings reached so much higher than they did 18 years ago when I first moved to this neighborhood. The smoke from the fires surrounding our region disorient me. The new buildings disorient me. My friend is my compass, my remember when, my person who knows what it’s like to be pissed at the world yet she continues to walk through it with conviction and love.

Last night we were walking through the neighborhood to go to a book launch. At the book launch I realized my writerly jealously has lowered…