My sister found this article to be really sentimental. These are her words:

Somewhere below my sentimental blatherings, check out the article
from Vox Online. My sister just sent it to me because it's about Belmont,
the town/village where I was born and where lived until I was 19 and because
she's always the one who knows how to make me cry.

My parents know or knew just about everyone mentioned in it and some
of the artists, the mas makers, the calypsonians bounced me on their knees.
It's strange to read about the place where you lived as an important but
fading archive of your country's culture. To me it was skinned knees and
chinneys (don't ask) and falling out of guava trees and the men on the
corner singing slightly drunken carols until sun up on christmas morning.

The place where you're born is just not ever really anything but
someplace to stand if your sentences still begin, "when I grow up...". This
is of course true until you do grow up and you're far away and it's suddenly
echoing in your head and figuring prominently in your dreams. In my dreams,
no matter where I start, I always end up walking out the gate of 147 Belmont
Circular Road. I am always looking over my shoulder. Hoping for a glimpse
of it's open front door; the wooden shutters, the mismatched glass panes,
the peaked galvanize roof, the faded brown paint, the concrete blocks hidden
behind the crotons and the potted plants, the windows shaded by guava trees,
the slight swing of the outdoor light over the table-tennis board. Waking
reminds me that its airy rooms and ancient handmade lattice work vents are
an unrecorded part of history. That this remnant of a shotgun slave-quarter
with its separate kitchen and its wholly separate (thank you Jesus) outdoor
toilet is gone- just that, gone.

Ok- I'm sharing this because today (thanks Steve) much more than
usual, I understand the feeling that the writer below has of wondering who
will consecrate our culture, my culture. Particularly the feeling of having
abandoned something important. The house that I grew up in is gone and with
it the community of athletes and thinkers and masmen and darts players and
musicians who made up the world as I knew it at age nine. A world that my
mother and father built almost without thinking, they simply opened their
home to the most wonderful universe of people that a child could imagine. I
know that, in ways, the legacy we built continued when we left but in key
ways, it's gone. Its home is gone and the town is going. People get on me
about all the "stuff" that I do. I wonder sometimes about my need to build
things and shape things but I know that it comes from being raised by my
parents and by those people in that house. I am the child of a panman and a
maswoman and I carry that with me every day, every day. Panmen make
beautiful solo music but what calls them is the way that music crescendos in
a steelband orchestra into a perfect frenzy of beauty. Mas is surreal. It
is a river of bodies building a story of color and forever retelling the
ethos of a people who would not be silenced. The single exquisitely
sequined mas player sitting on the side of the street just as the sun is
setting on carnival Tuesday, tired to her bones but still tapping her feet
in the fading light is sometimes even more beautiful, more eloquent. I
never feel that I can describe it but this is what I come from, this is what
is at my core and I don't know how to keep from losing that in my voice or
my work or my world.

The planet becomes more homogenized places like Belmont lose their
voices. The people leave and take their art with them to hide in their
Brooklyn basements or the artists die and are quickly forgotten simply
because no one has the time to learn arcane arts like wire bending or copper
beating or the proper placement of mirrors on sailor mas'.

All of a sudden today, I miss home so much I could cry.

Nuff love,
Lynne