On Burning and such

My neighbor, Sini
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

On Christmas eve I learned that my favorite restaurant, the place whose salads I dream of when I fall asleep after dinners involving powdered milk and bidik margerine, burned down. Information like that is hard to understand from here, too many questions pop up. I want to know how severe, what they're doing, whether the community is helping, why no one told me. It also brought up the bigger issue that I'm confronted with here, the fact that I know nothing. The place I used to bop around in, my homeland, in my mind, is exactly how I left it until someone informs me otherwise. While I'm studying a basket of rice for grains that crawl, things are happening outside over there. Will I return to a Western Mass I cannot recognize, where flowers on bridges have been pulled up, where the health food store has introduced self-checkout, and where cousins occupy former apartments?