My Life

I moved to Peekskill. New York when I was about eight years old. I used to live in Yonkers, New York but then my parents realized we needed a change. The area that I lived in in Yonkers was extremely bad. There were a lot of drugs and violence and my parents didn’t want to finish raising their family in this awful neighborhood. My family and I lived in a small two-bedroom apartment on Radford Street. My family consists of a mother a father five daughters and a son; obviously our family was a bit too big for this apartment. These were just some of the reasons that my parents wanted to move. According to my mother, the school that my sister’s and me were attending was not on the same level as some of the other schools in the state that we could have been attending. She thought we were too smart for the schools located in Yonkers. On the other hand, I loved the school that I was going to. I loved P.S 13 for a number of reasons. I really liked the faculty. All the teachers were so nice and friendly. Oddly enough, I liked the food as well. Most kids don’t like the cafeteria food but I liked this schools food. Everything seemed to be going so good, but I never realized what was actually going on. I didn’t really I was living in danger and that if I walked the wrong way home from school or looked at someone wrong or talked to the wrong person, my life could have been ended within a couple minutes. I never realized that my family and I were living in a community where so many tragic events were taking place right in front of our eyes.

I would sometimes come home from school and would see my mother crying. I would say, “mom what’s wrong?” She would wipe her tears away and say, “Nothing Lisa, do you have homework?” I would give her an answer and go on as if nothing was wrong. Years later I now realize that those tears dripping down my face were out of sadness. She hated the life she was living and the life that she was leading us to. Within a matter of time, she and my father began looking for a new place to live.

When my sisters and me found out we had to move we were devastated. My brother really didn’t care because he was so young but my sisters and me did not want to move at all. We knew we were going to have to leave our apartment, our school, our neighborhood and our friends, all of which we did not want to do. We asked if we could stay with of our uncle but she said no. No matter what me and my sisters now knew that we were not going to be able to stay in Yonkers. I finally got to the point where I asked her where we were moving and she said “Peekskill.”

My siblings and me hopped out the backseat of my father’s gray Crown Victoria and neither of us weren’t sure what to say. Everything seemed so different and nice. There were so many green street and the sidewalks were clean. There were many nice houses. We were all so used to living in Yonkers and seeing buildings. There wasn’t any graffiti on anything, whereas in Yonkers there was graffiti everywhere. We were all so used to living in Yonkers, which didn’t look anything like Peekskill. The streets were clean and there were no corner delis and there weren’t so many buildings. When we walked into our new house we thought it was so big, mainly because of the fact that our whole lives we’ve lived in a tiny apartment.

I was extremely nervous about starting school. In Yonkers I had many friends so I figured I would have just as many in this new school I was about to attend. The day finally came when I had to go to school. I went to school and liked it but of course not as much as I did in Yonkers. I liked the school and everything but I realized my friends and teachers from Yonkers were not there, I knew I had to make friends and so I did. After a while I really started