Welcome to the Union Center

Life in and around the Union Center goes at its own pace, listens to its own music, lives by its own rules.  A jarring combination of open and shut, welcoming and forbidding, not everyone is comfortable even visiting, not to mention moving in.  A certain type is drawn here.  When newcomers arrive by design or by fortuitous accident, everyone, residents and guest alike, knows right away if it’s going to work or not.

The heart of Union Center is a zany, colorful, hustle-bustle kind of place where, to be perfectly honest, you never know what’s going to hit next.  That’s the attraction for some, but what scares others off.  This is no place for subterfuge or politicking.  Unfeigned living and loving, giving and taking are the orders of the day. 

Though no one actually leaves the neighborhood, folks around here change their clothes a lot, putting on sometimes their party, other times their workaday duds.  Life here is never dull and the folks who live in and around Union Center are glad when guests drop by, even unannounced.  It takes a while to appreciate the ebb and flow of the living here.  To newcomers it appears as if life happens in spectacular bursts, seasonal shows of glory and color, interlinear shouts sandwiched between long, somnolent stretches of green or worse, event-less grey and brown.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Characters in the play interact and intertwine. Philosophers (seems everyone at Union Center is a philosopher!) argue.  The mysterious, sometimes tangled skein of relationships gets wound round this neighborhood’s hands in grand, great loops, and sometimes, little by little, gets rolled into a cozy, soft, ball.  All this happens all the time.  Even when the place gets drab, the activity doesn’t stop.

These are the life and times of the Union Center.  Pull up a chair and get to know this special place.  The riders and the shakers, the ups and downs, the celebrations and tragedies unique to here are also, somehow, universal to families and neighborhoods everywhere across borders and boundaries, cultures and clans.

Chapter 1 – My Neighbors

Chapter 2 – More Neighbors

Chapter 3 – Still More Neighbors: Late Spring at Union Center

Chapter 4 – Our Neighborhood’s Groups

About literarylee

I sling words for a living. Always have, always will. Some have been interesting and fun; most not. These days, I write the fun words early in the morning before the adults are up and make me eat my Cream of Wheat.
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