It was the hottest summer that the south had seen in quiet a long time. I remember the weather was so hot that we had major droughts that were so severe that the government had laws restricting the times that you could use water outdoors; most of the time we just could not even use water outdoors whatsoever. Most of the time when it gets hot you can go swimming or go to water parks, but the weather was so hot that the pools were like warm public baths and most of the water parks were shut down due to the major drought.

I had been living in the same little town in Michigan ever since I was just a few years old. I was born in Flint, Michigan and lived there until the age of two, that’s when we moved to Davison, Michigan, population, hardly any. Davison was a very small town; we had one middle school and one high school, the people that you went to elementary with were the same people that were in your middle school and the same people that you graduated with. Due to this fact the bonds that you made with your friends were for the most part a lifetime friendship. The community was very close knit; everyone went to all the football games and parades. Parades were a very big thing in Davison. We had on average about five parades a year. We had a parade for the homecoming football game for the high school, then another parade for Fourth of July, a Thanksgiving Day parade, another parade for Halloween, and finally a Christmas parade. Each one of the parades would last a few hours and tons of people were in the parades. I really did not want to move away from Michigan, but the fact of it was we just had to. The economy in Michigan was getting really bad. We had our house up for sale for quite a while; finally we had to foreclose on our house. I was pretty young when we finally moved here and I did not really understand how hard it was for my parents to do that; now that I am older I really understand how hard it truly was for my parents to do.

In Michigan one of the things we really liked to do was make fun of stupid southern people, as we thought of them. We thought of most if not all southerners as dumb redneck people who did not speak real English. This was a real struggle for me to get over when I first moved down here. Everyone that I saw down here I saw as the stereotypical dumb redneck person that I had grown up knowing them as. It didn’t matter what you told me I really just didn’t like you no matter what because you were living in the south. I still talked to most of my in Michigan; however, I didn’t have a whole lot of really good friends. The saying out of sight out of mind really set in when I moved here because once I was gone a lot of my friends in Michigan just kind of forgot about me. I really tried not to make friends when I moved down here because of what happened with a lot of my friends in Michigan. I figured that even if I did make friends we wouldn’t be friends for very long because we would be split up between the many different high schools and then forget about each other.

This all changed, however, when I met my now best friend Brandon Sponseller. Oddly enough my very first thought about this him was “Wow, this kid is a jerk”. Whenever anyone said something that he thought wasn’t correct he just had to correct them. He was also a smart ass who thought he knew everything. My thoughts changed, however, when he and two of his friends were hanging out at the pool in the neighborhood that I lived in. I was up at the pool with my mom and little brother. I was showing my brother how to do flips into the pool. Brandon and the two kids he was with started doing flips as well. We started a kind of friendly competition that turned into a cannonball contest. This was the start of a very good friendship.

Brandon has since moved back to Ohio where he is originally from. He used to lived with his mom down here but he likes the north much more than down here so he decided to move back to Ohio with his dad. We still talk all the time and he comes to visit once in a while and when he does we always make sure to make time to hang out together at least a few times. It is crazy to think that the kid who is now my best friend I despised at one point. I guess it just goes to show you really can’t judge a book by its cover.