In a plot of grass, behind a bar on Payne, right off Maryland Avenue on the east side of St. Paul there was once a blue house that I loved.
I remember the house the way it was: a blue two-story built sometime in the late 1890s. A farm house with a damp, earthen basement full of broken concrete on the floor, its walls sagging earth and cement. The house, whatever it had been, by 1988 was a duplex that was rented out to Hmong families.
Read the essay here.