In my 20s,
while attending graduate school,
I lived in a trailer park
in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Many days
I'd go running around the outer edge of the park,
a distance of about 1/4 mile.
I'd run around and around the same narrow, asphalt street,
past the same rusty trailers,
the same neighbors, who, like me, lived squeezed within their means,
few of whom (sadly) I ever got to know.

One cold afternoon,
a boy of 5 or 6
playing in his area-rug patch of weary lawn,
on my 3rd or 4th pass,
yelled out to me:
"What are you running from?"

What an amazing, unintentionally insightful question:
What was I running from?

Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.