Vox Meditantis

You ask an eighty-nine-year-old woman about relationships, and you likely expect to hear about a husband long gone or grandchildren who call on Sundays. I have those, and they are blessings, certainly. Arthur has been gone since ’98, rest his soul, and my grandson drives down from Philly when the traffic allows. But when you’ve lived in New Corinth as long as I have – long enough to remember when Market Street was so thick with shoppers on a Friday night you’d have to walk in the gutter, and long enough to see it empty out until you could hear a pin drop from three blocks away – you learn that the most important relationships aren’t always the ones with names you write in a birthday card.

The relationship that keeps me going these days is with the young girl, Christina, who moved into the renovated duplex next door. She’s one of those new people the city talks about in the papers, the ones coming for the “authentic riverfront experience”. When she first arrived, dragging boxes marked with university logos, I watched from my porch and thought, Here we go. Another one who’ll complain about the noise from the port and leave in a year. We see a lot of that in New Corinth; people want the history without the rust.

But Christina surprised me. Last winter, when we had that ice storm that turned the pavement into a skating rink, I heard a scraping sound at six in the morning. There she was, chipping away at my steps before she even touched hers. She didn’t do it for a thank you, and she didn’t do it for money. She just shouted, “It’s too slippy for you to be out here, Miss Martha!” and kept chopping.

That small kindness bridged a gap I didn’t know was passable. We have a rhythm now. I teach her that you can’t buy proper scrapple at those fancy new organic markets; you have to go to the butcher on 4th Street who still cuts it thick. She teaches me how to use the video calling on my phone so I can see my great-granddaughter’s face without pressing the wrong button and hanging up. It’s a quiet relationship, built on the shared wall of our row homes and the understanding that in a city like this, you look out for your neighbors because nobody else is going to do it for you.

Then there is my relationship with the River itself. It sounds foolish to say you have a relationship with a body of water, but the Delaware has been the loudest neighbour I’ve ever had. I remember the smell of it in the summer of ’55, heavy and thick before the floods came, and I remember how it looked in ’78 when the Iron Works closed – grey and angry, like it knew the life was bleeding out of the town.

I sit on my back porch now, overlooking Minerva Creek where it feeds into the main channel, and we have an understanding, the water and I. It took the men in my family – my father to the shipyards, my Arthur to the Iron Works – and it gave them back tired and dirty, but it put food on our table. Now, I watch the new folks jogging along the Greenway, taking pictures of the sunset over the water like it’s a postcard. They see the beauty; I see the work. But the river accepts us both. It reminds me that everything changes – the factories turn into condos, the check-cashing joints turn into coffee shops – but the current keeps moving. That constancy is a comfort when your knees ache and your address book is full of crossed-out names.

Finally, there’s the group of us “leftovers” who meet at the diner on Tuesday mornings. We don’t call ourselves that, but we know what we are. We’re the ones who stayed when the white flight emptied the neighbourhoods in the sixties, and we’re the ones who boarded up our windows during the unrest in ’68 but didn’t pack our bags. We drink coffee that tastes like battery acid and argue about whether the new Mayor is doing enough for the potholes on the west side.

These relationships – the neighbour who salts my walk, the river that marks my time, and the friends who remember the city before it was “revitalised” – they anchor me. They remind me that I am not just an old woman waiting out her days; I am a piece of this place.

Positive impact isn’t always about being made happy. Sometimes, it’s about being held in place when the world tries to spin you off. New Corinth has a way of holding onto you, if you let it. And I suppose, after eighty-nine years, I’ve decided to let it hold me a little while longer.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.