I looked at my child, sitting, coloring, sandwiched between the other children doing the same at the small table set up for them. Small chairs, a basket of colored crayons, bright white sheets of paper, day of the dead art exploding around them like brilliant indoor fireworks. I noticed something I don’t often think about anymore; my child is so white. And a question hit me, I wonder what it is like for her to be raised here as a minority?
In a valley settled by Mormon Pioneers, I was raised on the upper east side of the city. The only diversity I knew was an occasional variation in the length of mower settings for the front lawns. In my bed at night when the desert air was wet enough to carry the sound of the trains off the valley floor up the mountain benches I could hear the horns calling. Beautiful music coming from trains made up of many different colored cars. I would fall asleep dreaming of them.
Eight years after moving our family over the tracks WEST, my oldest child fell in love with the children of the Grove, the neighborhood river north of our homestead. She works down here, west of the city that is Salt Lake, in the after school program of a title one school. She posts photo’s of her in a sea of warm little faces. Kids with a ray of toasted caramel skin.
Both my daughters are exceptionally fair, Irish Pale. I am dark, my hair, my eyes, even my skin. My daughters are like snowflakes in autumn.
We have found a beautiful life here.
A world full of color, in the longest autumn.
The most beautiful of all the seasons.
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