What’s happening outside our windows
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- March 23, 2025
- 635
“My job is to show up at places, to remind them that I’m here,” George said.
He was sitting across from me at the old kitchen table we’ve had for 35 years. The morning light slanted across our tousled hair onto the table’s surface. This table has sat in four different kitchens: a little brick house in Walnut Creek, a cheery two-story in Sugarcreek, a small home tucked just outside Berlin and a bungalow in Canton.
Its surface is worn away, in desperate need of a sand and varnish. Most weeks I change her up by reaching for a tablecloth from my colorful stack of thrifted ones. Warm and inviting, good for leaning elbows on and eating a breakfast of chilaquiles and eggs. Good for serving our grandsons plates of mac and cheese while we discuss the latest version of Astro Bot.
For 35 years George has driven the backroads of Holmes and surrounding counties. We now reside in Canton and are wending our way through her side streets, figuring out the best way to get places. We chat lightly as we do so, desperate for normalcy.
But as of late, our chatter has been heavy — filled with uncertainty in a world that looks upside down to anyone looking in.
Many are happy with how the new administration is operating. Many might believe deporting people en masse will solve the problems this country faces. We see the likes and comments on posts celebrating this. But from my precarious view, this will touch everyone in ways yet unseen.
Where this couple sits is on the edge of a precipice so deep and vast, not knowing whether to slip away or stay in place, holding our own in a crumbling last act of resistance.
Our conversations lately go like this: carry all forms of ID any time you go out. Don’t open the door if someone knocks. Check your surroundings. Stay careful.
All this despite legal residency.
George’s presence is important. He is your neighbor, and he is your friend. Is he OK? Does anyone think one day he might be here and the next day he could be gone? What did we as a collective neighborhood do to make sure he doesn’t disappear unjustly? Or is he collateral damage in a grander scheme?
If the “dangerous ones” must go and we don’t demand a name and status as they’re taken, how do we know who they were? Have we checked on our neighbors who hail from other countries? Are they OK? Are they gone? Should we ask why?
Due process for them means due process for us. Without it, not even I could prove who I am.
George has been here for 35 years, the same length of time we’ve had our kitchen table. He is as worn and smooth as that wood grain after quintuple bypass heart surgery last year. He has been to your kitchens and smoothed paint on your walls. He has sat at your tables and drank coffee. His existence here is as important as anyone’s. But the rules keep spiraling down a deeper, darker hole until unrecognizable.
It is said that “only caring about your own rights is exactly how you lose them.” George and I care what happens to us, to you, to them. No one wants to let it in, really. But it’s happening anyway, every day, outside our windows.
Melissa Herrera is a reflective writer who captures the beauty and sorrow of change. With a career spanning 14 years as an opinion columnist and the publication of two books, she resides in Stark County with her husband and four cats. She writes to preserve memories. You can reach her at junkbabe68@gmail.com.