Just like in the movies.

My lovely Friends and Visitors passing through,

Long before I come here where my mother now live, I useta think that this Big International Country got skyscrapers and concrete pavement everywhere, parks and lawn and, well, y'know how they show them fancy places in movies. All swank and swish and stylish like in the Devil Wears Prada. Or colonial-style houses, huge like ten families coulda get lost in them.

And on Hallmark Channel, small town is flowers hanging in baskets on front porches. Little shops with bells at the doors. Wide-open farms, green like the grass on the other side. Even them cows look ready for Vogue Magazine. Romance in the air. Handsome man about to meet gorgeous gal who got she own business baking biscuits or cakes, something sweet. Or flowery. 

Yes, I would see films about small town with board-houses...houses make with wood only. But the truth is, and I bet plenty 3rd world people feel the same, I useta think down-trodden small town was a rare scene in big countries. 

The way them big-shot writers from high-class foreign magazines would write about my lovely native land when they visit, down-talking it, you would believe that small town images in they countries ain't a true-true thing. Paint peeling, window frame need fixing. Men wearing singlet, ladies in wash-out old tee-shirt. Lobster-coloured men sitting on doorsteps, cigrit hanging from the corner o' they mouth; they growling home-truths about life and pain or they cussin' up a stink; the wimmen...I don't remember what wimmen do in them kinda movies, I think they indoors cooking bacon that spattering and sputtering hot oil on the wall. 

This week gone, I pass through small town.

Sunny, blue sky, trees trimblin' in light wind, a bird call trillin' through. Plenty-plenty land with bush and trees with vine weaving everything together. 

I woulda been happy if I wasn't going to do routine blood test. Or as they say in these parts, blood work.

I woulda see more details if I wasn't worrying that I gon faint from fear and horror.

But I manage to set up a collage o' cliches in me headspace. Paint peeling, oh wait, what paint, the po' shack need paint. Planks on building slipping down. No business happening. Shops lock up, board up. A shell of a house so ole, the jumbies haunting the jumbies.

Then suddenly, there, apartments on a hilly slope, just like in Jamaica in the touristy areas, across from the water. You could feel the wealth and happiness like it was you' own. And in the middle of all this wealth, a dark blue bulk of a building with Van Gogh starry nights. For some reason, maybe cos I been going for blood test, it look a li'l gloomy.

I didn't see a single soul on the way to the clinic. Not one single singlet or bacon.

Another day, I gon tell you about the gyaff...conversation...with the taxi driver.

Watch this space. 

Have a lovely week, me friends. Wherever you go, no matter how simple, even if is just outside you' home, enjoy the view. Stare on the tall grass, check out the sky. 

Plenty lurve, neena.