Growing up in the San Fernando Valley was quite an experience and the people that lived there were as multifarious as a colorful palette would be for an artist. Friends came from all different nationalities; Iranian, African American, Indian, Spanish, and American and their cultures all blended in the tan-colored, three-story apartment complex where we lived. The complex contained two miniature parks with green, grassy areas, sandboxes, swings and barbeque pits. There was a laundry facility next to a very large swimming pool in another area of the complex. Concrete walkways, bordered by green shrubs, and yellow and white daisies, led from one area of the complex to the next. It was a place where people spent their lives together in work and …show more content…
Hide and seek became a common game that we would play with them and in the end, we always ended up on the same, old, tire swing, located in the sandbox, which you could see from our third floor apartment balconies. In the sandbox, the tire swing hung horizontally as three ropes connected it to the wooden beam above our heads. Sometimes we would twist the swing up tight and then lean our heads back as it spun us uncontrollably, making us dizzy. Then, we would just lay on the swing, taking in the scent of the newly, cut grass and the freshly, watered daisies as we recovered and regained our sense of balance. Other times we would face each other on the swing, playing pat-a-cake as we kept an eye out for our little sisters to return. It was on this swing that she found out we were moving away and my parents had not provided us with an explanation.

My parents had not told us that we were moving because of the busing in our schools. It was the 1970’s and it was a time for desegregation, the government’s way to balance the races in schools and change the attitudes that people had against other races. My parents had decided to move our family out of the San Fernando Valley because they were afraid of letting us ride on a school bus to a different school, one that they could not choose, and one that was further away than the school that they drove us to every day. They thought that they were leaving a bad situation and making a better life for their