Made with AI trained only on my own artwork. The honest story of how, and why →
People assume poor places make people small.
Make them mean.
Grabby.
It’s not true.
The impression I’ve likely given people as I travel the globe, searching for truth, betrays that truth. I grew up believing the opposite, and forty-some years of travel hasn’t once talked me out of it.
So if you read these words, and I’ve offended you or, TGII forbid, hurt you by my bad example…please forgive me.
I know better.
For all our faults, District Nine was kind.
Not because it could afford to be…but because it couldn’t afford not to be.
Let me set the scene, since half of you have never smelled coal smoke and machine oil together and think that sounds romantic. It doesn’t. It smells like a district that works too hard for what it gets. Gear Lane and Ninth Main crossed two streets from my mother’s workshop. Iron shutters on every storefront. A crooked clock tower in the square that leaned two degrees left and never got fixed, because nobody had two coins to rub together for a thing that already told the time close enough.
The Perra family ran the bakery on the corner. They were a family you would meet once and never forget them. Three generations of happy, humble gnomes. Same ovens, same songs softly being sung while working,…same flour dust in the same cracks in the floor.
Same smiles.
Same round bellies.
Same kindness.
Here is what I actually remember, and I’ve checked this against my own notes twice because I don’t trust nostalgia... I trust records.
Even my own.
I remember Old Man Vantt and my mother going eleven months without speaking after he shorted her on a gear order. Real grudge. The kind neighbors build a wall out of.
I remember him climbing onto our roof in a hailstorm eight weeks into that silence. Our chimney flashing had torn loose and my mother was seven months from delivering my sister. My father had been sent on an assignment by Morphiophelius Smith and the techno-mägo, and I was too young to do it. Old Man Vantt spend the whole day on our roof, repaired the damage, and several other spots at a critical point.
When he left, he did so sopping wet, with a solemn expression…and a single tip of his cap to my mother in respect. Some things simply weren’t up for debate.
He never mentioned the gears.
She never mentioned the roof.
That’s District Nine.
That’s every poor gnome quarter I’ve ever documented, if I’m honest about the pattern instead of precious about my own childhood.
The argument was real. The disagreement mattered.
But not as much as the person having it with you.
I bring this up because Jaime played me “We Got Us.” A Gear Girls track. I won’t pretend I’m equipped to review music... I catalogue ruins for a living, not choruses. But something in it got past the mustache, past the grumbling, past forty years of professional detachment, and landed somewhere I don’t let visitors.
It pulled me straight back to that roof windowsill. Watching a gnome my mother wasn’t speaking to, fixing a problem we hadn’t asked him to fix.
And then, the way these things do, it kept going.
It put me in a kitchen with my beloved Sylvia. Twenty-two years of her.
…and…
…and I won’t say more than that.
Some records I keep for myself.
It put Alhannah in my head, my amazing daughter, out there being fiercer than I ever managed to be. Protecting others. Fighting evil.
…and my boy Green, who I think about more than I write down.
Home isn’t a place for me anymore. Hasn’t been in a long time.
But it’s still a shape. And that song traced it.
So.
Advice.
Since you didn’t ask for it…and I’m giving it anyway.
The world’s in a state. I don’t need to catalogue that for you, you’re living it same as I am. Everyone’s got a reason to stay angry at somebody right now, and most of those reasons are fair.
Honestly, I don’t know if it’ll change.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Likely not.
Be the fool who fixes the roof anyway.
Not because the argument didn’t matter.
It did.
Have that argument.
Finish it, even.
Just don’t let it decide whether you show up.
Keep the ledger of who wronged you if you must. I’m a chronicler, I understand that impulse better than most. But keep a second ledger too, of who needed you regardless, and answer to that one first.
Always first.
When the day ends and you have to look yourself in the mirror…
You just might find a familiar face smiling back at you.
District Nine taught me that…and this song reminded me of it.
Thanks, Jaime.
Good friend, that boy.
I’d rather pass this wonderful song on than sit on it.
No, that’s not sentiment. Just good archival practice.
Listen to the song.
Download it.
Share it.
A lot.
Höbin Luckyfeller
FieldScribe, still owed a roof repair by approximately three people, none of whom I’m naming.