—— in 2020 ——
The sun warms the earth as the ice melts. Bare twigs swing in the spring breeze, waiting for the first new buds.
March is the best time for spring outings. The grass hasn’t sprouted yet, and we decided to have a half-hour road trip yesterday.
Unlike big cities on the east and west coasts, Fargo has a sparse population. The whole country is fighting with the coronavirus while people here try to stay calm. When we drove by the streets, we saw people walking their dogs in threes and fours.
We live in an apartment building a few blocks away from the main campus because of the short commute. If we lived farther away from school, we would have more choices for the house type and better rent. Our building was built in the 1970s and made of wood. The soundproofing material is poor, and we consistently hear the hum of the neighbor’s AC unit. It is noisy as a busy railroad just a mile away from our building. Trains rumble by every night as if we live in the film, but I am getting used to it.
I know little about the neighbors since different people come and go. There must be some long-term tenants who live on the first floor in the building. I have seen unchanged names on their mailboxes for a long time and never had a chance to meet them.
We had lived on the second floor for a year until last fall then we decided to move up to the third floor within the same building. The living room of the previous apartment faces the west. Since Fargo, relatively has a lower sun angle during the summer, the glare was a big trouble. We also need one more room for our desks as we used to place them in the living room. The apartment on the third floor has two bedrooms and faces east. The rent is 80 dollars more than we paid for the last apartment, which is affordable.
Neither of the two apartments offers a garage. Parking on a ground, our car has been consistently exposed to the sun. Six garages, occupied by other tenants, are apparently not enough for seventeen apartments. Every time we email the management it always tells us that we have already been on the waiting list. I hope that the manager will notify us when someone with a garage is going to move out. To get a garage, we need to pay an extra 50 dollars. But it will prevent our car from snow and save a lot of time before driving.
Driving to the north, we can visit the massive farmlands in 10 minutes. The fertile field abounds with corns, neatly arranged. Cash crops are planted in large quantities in Fargo. I was taken aback by the fact that this city imports most of its farm products from Central and South America. Driving around in town, we can see several big storage towers filled with sugar. What stand along the highway are agriculture machinery plants, timber processing companies, and cement factories. With the sugar towers, the factories constitute Fargo’s cityscape, which was my first impression. During my early days in Fargo, I could smell a strange odor in the air. I thought it was the emission of chemical gas. I attempted to find the chimneys but got nothing. Almost a year had passed, I finally found out the source, it’s the landfill.