Essay: Miguel Street

Miguel Street – A dramatic story of a woman who kept faith in life but finally lost it.

Laura, a woman living in Miguel Street always kept faith in life, even though life was harsh at some point. Laura has got 8 children, has had 7 different men, and hasn’t got a lot of money. As we are talking with neighbors the following quotes best describe her: ‘An amazing woman was she’ and ‘ everybody welcome there’. Hat, an inhabitant of Miguel Street says about her: ‘Her children: happiest persons in Miguel Street, must be’. Overall, they believe other women must be jealous of her, life must have looked a bit sunnier when you saw her. What is the secret of this woman? And how did it all go wrong? This is a try to answer these questions by stories of inhabitants of Miguel Street, and Laura herself.

Laura was born in Miguel Street, some decades ago. The first 6 kids she had, were created by different men. ‘she blamed god, and the wickedness of men’ tells Hat. But the strange thing was, she looked very happy with her kids. What surprised everybody was the fact that the 7^th and the 8^th kid she had, were created by the same men, Nathaniel. Eddoes, an inhabitant of Miguel Street quotes ‘Strange men, tried be one of guys, came not from here’. Laura didn’t like Nathaniel, as they could all could imagine. After her 7^th kid, she feared Nathaniel with the following: ‘You think because you give me one baby, you own me. That baby only come by accident, you hear’. Nathaniel left. When he was already left, she got her 8^th baby. She didn’t seem to have had problems with that at all, but what made her loose her faith in life?

‘It was the baby, daughter had one’ tells Popo, who is a carpenter and is creating the thing without a name. Lots of stories are told by the inhabitants of Miguel Street, but they all came down to the following. Her oldest daughter Lorna tells her mother she is pregnant, and gives birth to a baby. From then on, Laura cries heartrending. There are different opinions about this in Miguel street, for example Boyee: ‘She had 8^th babies herself’ and Hat: ‘She old now’, he understood her, she was a grandmother now, she was old now. And the most surprising came from B. Wordsworth, who is a poet, ‘She sees all misery she has had will happen again to her daughter, this life is really a circle, if nothing changes, the same misery happens to various generations, she realizes life can be harsh towards you, if you see what happens to others’. Laura will never be the same woman again. This dramatic story has a terrible end, Lorna drowns in the river, and Laura reacts like she doesn’t care very much, which in fact reflects she will never be the same woman again.

This is just one of the dramatic stories, which captures Miguel Street these days. People who seem to have found luck change dramatically by an event. They seem to have lost faith in life. As Hat summarizes the situation in this street: ‘Life is tragedy’.