North Jersey

I used to live in North Jersey. Just for a year. The first year we were married.

We lived in Clifton, right across from the Pathmark on Paulison Avenue, near the border of Paterson. I miss a lot of things about life there. It was surprisingly simple, having so little money and spending so much of it just on rent. Five years later, we still don't pay as much for our mortgage as we did every month on rent. Actually, we never paid rent as low as our mortgage payment anywhere we lived.

One of the neat things about living in a huge metro region like that is all the nooks and crannies. Towns can lose something when they're so close to an international city like New York, but they make up for it by having interesting corners and people and buildings. I guess all cities have those kinds of things, but in the shadow of New York, you start to relate to small things.

Right before we left, we discovered this sculpture garden. I think it was on the grounds of Clifton City Hall. And about the same time I started noticing the manhole covers and the way they said, "City of Clifton."

I bought our first snow shovel in the Clifton Home Depot. There was supposed to be this once every 50 years snow storm, and I thought it would be good to have a shovel, even though we had no driveway to clear. I went to the store and they were sold out. As I was walking out, a new shipment came in and I was the first to grab a shovel before this crowd of people saw them and started a rush. The snow storm never came. Just kind of didn't happen for some reason.

I broke the shovel our first winter in our house. We had a lot of snow that year and it was too heavy and it broke the shovel. I used it maybe 3 times.

I've also broken every other snow shovel I've bought since. See my profile. It snows a lot here.