You might pass it up on first glance - after all, it is a residential area behind a shopping strip, not a place one would assume there are places to live. At least, not places most people would want to live. But if you go behind the old, abandoned Whole Foods and walk back behind the hotels which are only occupied annually aside from a few stints in the summertime for family reunions, you'll find an entire bustling community. Within these communities, on these streets, are a handful of apartment complex - situated next to each other carefully like Russian nesting dolls that have been scrupulously, carefully taken apart and set beside each other in a line down the road, piecemeal. The first apartments you come upon are ones which have been on the news for some fairly unsavory dealings, so we won't focus on those too much - appearances, after all, can be deceiving. But the apartments beside that complex, and the two complexes beside that one, are a whole other world that almost no one living in this area knows about. Across from those complexes is a community college's satellite campus - a quiet, sleepy set of buildings standing sentinel beside the road, where students putter in with coffee in hand, yawning at 7 in the morning to begin their sleepy days. The iron gates creak open to admit them one by one, while commuters shake their fists out the window and groan at them for holding up traffic on days attendance is higher. The road t-bones into another residential road, with a park on one side and a rehabilitation center for people who have broken bones in unfortunate circumstances. The treatment center boasts cheerful porch furniture, and a lazily undulating ceiling fan which churns the warm, thick summertime air back and forth. Children run back and forth in the grass at the park across the street, cartwheeling and pinwheeling across the prickly green stalks while bees lazily turn in the flower patches by the road. Old retired folks walk their dogs on the walking path, scowling at the teenagers on their skateboards and nodding demurely at the teenage girls clustered by the playground equipment, gossiping about boys and the latest YouTube sensations. There is a sushi place in a strip mall beside the park that has inexpensive food but never seems too busy - a swimming supply store right beside that, and a nail salon nestled in between. You could fill your pool for the season while getting a manicure and eating hibachi chicken, all at once - the beauty of a strip mall. There is a frozen yogurt place there too, one of the DIY kind, and you often see the teens in the park clutching cold, sweating cups of frozen yogurt covered in toppings while they do stunts on their skateboards and vape because they believe it to be the coolest. The neighborhood in question is a slice of Americana - a piece of history in the sleepy south where hardly anything changes, not even time.
