Descriptive essay
Welcome Home
In the short story The Hidden Life of Garbage, by Heather Rogers, she writes about how waste management is put away on the out skirts of town. Hidden from the consumer’s eye so that a person cannot smell or see the huge amounts of garbage and debris, Heather uses detail to tell her readers about the process of removing the trash from a town. “There’s a reason landfills are tucked away, on the edge of town, in otherwise untraveled terrain, camouflaged by hydroseeded, neatly tiered slopes.” (The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers, page 189, paragraph 3.) Shelby writes in detail about what a visitor would see if they were to be walking down the street of her neighborhood. She describes her street, also what a welcoming community with a historic charm and attention to detail would look like.
Walking down the streets of Shelby’s neighborhood a visitor that has never been to Galesburg, IL will see a community that is like very few; but far in between. Galesburg was founded in the 1830’s by George Washington Gale. The small town of Galesburg was the first anti-slavery society in the state of Illinois. Galesburg was also a stop on the Underground Railroad. The first houses that were established in this tiny town were log cabins. In the early 1900’s Galesburg became more prosperous due to the growth of the railroad; the housing and communities grew fast.
As of today, Shelby’s neighborhood is in an historical district. Which means that the houses are part of a museum group to help preserve the appearance and beauty of its originality of the house. Some of the houses that were erected in the 1900’s still stand at salute to the roads that are made of red clay bricks. As years have aged the surface and caused the brick road to become a rough terrain with dips and bumps. Only a handful of sidewalks, which act like a rugged trail, match the worn out roads that are still planted in the ground and have not yet been uprooted to be...