Friday, April 5, 2013

First Friday: April 5, 2013

It's the first Friday of April 2013. The buildings in the city of Goshen are distinctive from the building on either sides. Different generations and race fill the sidewalks as they all enter and exit Mom and Pop stores. An antique store catches my eye from my car and I make a mental note to check it out.
Parking is difficult. I wasn't sure why I expected it to be easy. Each street I cruse has parking spots, but they're filled with red, tan, silver, and black cars, vans, and trucks. I have to expand my perimeter to find a spot and I park my silver car by a church. I only need to walk a couple of blocks to enter into the First Friday environment.
The corner where I enter is cluttered with racks of clothing to fit toddler boys and girls. The pink ruffles flutter in the spring breeze. Perhaps the breeze isn't from the late spring, but from all of the vehicles driving under green lights and then speeding under yellow lights. The crosswalk sign seems to be forever red; protecting pedestrians or preventing us from crossing?
Finally on the other side of the street, I notice friends from my Mennonite college and greet them. They look so funny in their shorts, over sized T-Shirts, and neon green and black striped tights. The numbers pinned onto their stomachs indicate that they just had a fair amount of exercise. "We just ran the 5k" I'm very impressed since I don't even know what that means, but it must be a lot. "Only 3 miles." Yeah, a lot.
The center of the downtown has fences up so that vehicles don't cause mass destruction. Booths are set up to promote businesses and I smell warm pretzels. One booth catches my attention quickly. An Amish couple huddles over a large kettle that resembles a black cauldron to cook up spells or chili. They're stirring something inside and suddenly pour it into a container. Popcorn flood out of the kettle and into a basket. It's immediately scooped into plastic baggies and sold to Goshennites.

1 comment:

  1. Olivia: I really like your description of First Fridays: it’s very vivid. I couldn’t help but notice that your brief description lacked a thesis? What is the point of your description? It would be a nice introduction for your paper if you condensed it a bit or dispersed the images throughout your paper. It would be interesting to hear about First Fridays as a contact zone because it is probably one of Goshen’s biggest contact zones. It may be good to even add in some statistics to your blog post here so that readers can learn more from what you have experienced.

    ReplyDelete