“So”, my husband asks, “do all American towns and cities have an east side where they keep all the trashy people?”

This came on our return drive from southern Illinois and our honeymoon. We had been though East Peoria and East Galesburg. The first place was a pee break at a 66 station near the airport where people had no sense of personal space while queuing up and couldn’t seem to walk off without lotto tickets or smokes. The latter was home to one of the largest mobile home parks I had yet to see on the trip, and at one point I was beginning to wonder if everyone south of Springfield lived in easily transportable abodes. Illinois appears to have been settled by people who believe highly combustible funnel cloud magnets should always gather in large numbers out on the open prairie.

Rob’s Iowan experiences include an eastside of Des Moines and an East Dubuque, have colored his perceptions. But honestly, east is not often prime real estate. Why do you think God sent Adam and Ever to live there? It’s home to American Idol voters and the idea that everything one will ever need out of life can be found within a 2 mile radius of Grandma’s house because she is the only one with a permanent address. It’s that bit of ground that we all want to flee as teens but that too many of us end up being buried under.

I have been reading Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, a book about the multiple lives of our souls (aka reincarnation). It says that we choose our lives in order to learn and grow. But who would choose to be the mullet do’d cashier at the corner gas mart or the guy purchasing two 12 packs of Milwaukee’s Best with a couple cans of Copenhagen at 10:30 on a Friday morning? Are these learning opportunities? Or destinies gone horribly wrong?

Much of what we saw, outside the national park, was poverty. The neighborhoods on the east side of Murphysboro were filled with worn homes often blockaded from the rest of the street by the kind of junk that even Oprah intervention people throw away. In a lot of ways these streets were like the old Walmart joke – a little piece of Arkansas every where you go – because if I hadn’t known I was in Illinois I would have thought I was back in the area surrounding Devils Den State Park near Fayetteville. Murphysboro, Carbondale, Marion. Towns that bled into each other, held together by strip malls and car lots. The differences between classes of the people who lived there plainly evident in the vehicles and the clothes and the conditions of the homes. Makes you wonder what kind of  assignments God was handing out that could have resulted in any of this or what makes us chose such lessons.