Leaves of Farming Ridge Boulevard
By: Kordel Davis
Tags: Divorce, Family, American History, Pennsylvania, Nonfiction

Mortgage-backed securities. The American Dream hinges on their distribution frequency and the willingness of the banks to lend money to people who might just not ever pay it back. Come 2007, we would find out just how corrupt the backrooms that signed those securities are, watching and learning the middle class was funded by lucrative brainwashers tricking men and women into thinking a six-bedroom house accounted to some sort of equity. Come one, come all, come buy a house for the banks. Such a gift can only be granted to those doers, those go-getters, those trendsetters. They came to Farming Ridge Boulevard in the late ’90s, oh so far away from the homeless and the Section 8 communities attempting to create “hell for suburbia,” and oh so close to the lions and tigers and banks and bankruptcies… oh my…

Now, what’s so wrong with Section 8 communities? Does their inability to obtain mortgage-backed securities automatically write them off as not being a beneficial member of the community? If not for Judge Robert E. Simpson’s ruling on November 30, 1999, forcing me into the foster care system, only eleven days after the Adoption and Safe Families Act was signed by President Bill Clinton, I might myself be looking to add my name to the long-lined waitlist of Section 8. Before President Clinton’s signature, the law of the land was the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, which American states interpreted as meaning “biological families be kept together, no matter what.” Eleven days… Eleven days….

Christmas was always a special time of the year in our boulevard house led by the pastor and his wife. Popcorn strings covered the Christmas farm tree, waiting for Santa to climb down the chimney and bring us, children, gifts. I sat up all night staring at my neon starlit bedroom ceiling. My first year on the boulevard included binoculars, camera toys, remote control cars and helicopters, handheld gaming devices, a drivable electric vehicle, and a McDonald’s Deluxe Mealtime Set, today a rarity selling for upwards of thousands of dollars on Amazon and eBay. We’re not in Section 8 anymore, and this was no Section 8 Christmas.

A Section 8 Christmas includes, first, trying to get through Thanksgiving. That time of the year in which the Property Manager begins their season of paid days off, unable to sign any vouchers, unable to help the very people they claim to fight for. And these people out there surviving on eight dollars an hour; could you survive on eight dollars an hour? Having a baby on Black Friday, facing eviction for having an unregistered baby on Black Friday while the leasing office is closed. The screams the yells the cries, the threats towards the Property Manager’s life not because they dared hurt the manager, but because the manager does not realize before taking the job such a position includes acting as an agent not for, but against the innocents. “You can be an agent against someone else and not even realize you’re being used. That’s The Matrix.”

No Property Managers ran Farming Ridge Boulevard, instead, the banks sat as agents, waiting for their patrons to come on in with a few derivative changes. The asset, the bank’s asset, would soon be back in the distributor’s hands — a divorce was near.

Lake Wynonah is where the brokenhearted woman would take her four adopted children in 2002. Can they find their way home? Thanksgiving and Christmas were now on the lake, whoopie pies were now our go-to weekend dessert, Keith Urban’s Golden Road was the go-to breakup album, and Shania’s Up! was the go-to female empowerment album.

My rebellious soul was being developed in that house on the lake, too. Pastor Erin and I were making hamburgers together before she had any sons of her own, and I was told, “Don’t add anything to the meat,” as she stepped away for a few minutes. I grabbed the salt container and poured it into the uncooked meat until my mark could be made on the recipe. Pastor Craig remembers that dang house and party, too, reminiscing on it the day before Mother’s Day 2020. “Man, that house was cool!” I laugh and tell him the story of those salty burgers that my mother’s father thoroughly enjoyed.

The man would roll over to Montgomery County not too long after, and we would soon meet his mistress at church, with a story of “all the women in the crowd wanted him.” The mistress invited us over to her house, we played in the pool and throughout the neighborhood. I learned how to grill chicken on the bone, always utilizing Jack Daniel’s Old №7 barbeque sauce. I learned how to powerwash a house, learned how to navigate a John Deere lawnmower, learned that my father would hand down his car to his mistress’s son before his own sons. She showed off her Avril Lavigne Let Go album, always making it hard to remember her very presence helped lead a family into divorce and make things so complicated.

I was told years after the divorce was finalized, only days before my seventeenth birthday, “Look at all this money he makes. Why can’t I have some of it?” Soon after the judge granted more money in favor of the plaintiff, all of my belongings were thrown outside the house. Days after my eighteenth birthday, I’m told, “I no longer get child support for you. I can no longer support you.”

Somehow through liquidations and divorce battles galore, the mother and her four “kids” were able to move back into the Farming Ridge Boulevard house, not too long before moving over to Laurel Springs. Frequent moves and the addition of step-parents and step-siblings. I sometimes forget that I had a life whatsoever before the divorce.