Vox Meditantis

What could you do differently?

It’s 6:45 AM and the Delaware River looks like hammered sheet metal, grey and hard and moving too fast to freeze, even with the wind chill pushing ten degrees. I’m sitting in my truck with the heater blasting, nursing a coffee that’s burning a hole through the cardboard sleeve, staring out at the Turning Basin.

The prompt popped up on that mindfulness app my girlfriend, Sarah, made me download. “What could you do differently?”

Honest answer? I could have moved to Charlotte like my cousin Mike. I could have gone to UD instead of doing the HVAC certification at the tech college. I could have not eaten that second breakfast sandwich just now.

But if I’m being real, mostly I think about how I handle this place. New Corinth.

I’ve lived here all my twenty-four years, from the row homes in Little Italy where my Nonna still sweeps the sidewalk every morning, to the apartment I’m renting now over in the Hilltop. I know this city’s bones. I know that if you dig too deep in the backyard near the old chemical plant, the dirt smells like pennies and bad decisions. I know that the fancy new “Riverview Lofts” down here used to be the sprawling rail yards where my Pop-Pop lost two fingers hooking freight cars.​

The city’s changing, and I’ve been cynical about it. That’s what I could do differently.

See, it’s easy to be bitter in New Corinth. It’s our default setting. We’re the “shadow twin” to Wilmington, the place people drive past on 95 without looking. When the tech bros from Philly started moving into the rehabbed warehouses in the Arts District, buying $6 coffees and acting like they discovered the Minerva Creek waterfront, I rolled my eyes. I called them tourists in my own hometown.​

But yesterday, I was up on a roof fixing a heat pump for one of those new “maker spaces” on Market Street. It was a robotics lab for high school kids. And I saw these kids – local kids, from the Riverside district, kids who grew up hearing the same stories about layoffs and opioid ghosts that I did – programming drones to monitor water quality in the creek. They weren’t cynical. They were hungry.​

I realised I’ve been carrying around this heavy, wet-blanket attitude like it’s a badge of honour. Like being from Delaware means you have to expect the worst. We got that “scrappier little sibling” complex real bad.​

If I could do something differently, starting today, this Wednesday in January, it’s this: I’d stop looking at New Corinth like a waiting room for somewhere better.

I’d stop driving past the boarded-up row homes on 4th Street and just seeing blight; I’d see the families there trying to hold it down. I’d stop mocking the “Polar Lines Day” posters at the library and maybe actually go listen to what people are shouting about this year.​

There’s a history here of people who didn’t just survive, but did something. The guys who walked out of the Iron Works in ’78 didn’t just quit; they refused to be disrespected. The people who light candles for the “Night of the Neon Cross” aren’t just mourning; they’re claiming the streets back from the darkness.​

I finished my coffee. The sun is trying to break through the clouds over the Jersey side of the river. The water is still grey, but the port cranes downriver are starting to move, lifting containers like they weigh nothing.

I put the truck in gear. I got a full slate of calls today – three broken furnaces in the Heights and a boiler downtown. It’s not glamorous work. It’s not a tech startup. But it keeps people warm.

I wouldn’t leave. I wouldn’t trade this grey river for a blue ocean. But I can trade the chip on my shoulder for a wrench. That’s what I’ll do differently. I’ll show up. Just like this city always does.

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Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.