February 15, 2021:
I stopped at a roadside market on the backroads of Southern California. They had an oldschool soda machine on their porch. Bright red, with bottles displayed behind a vertical slice of glass.
It took me back to a part of my childhood.
I grew up in San Diego in an urban area, but my grandfather was a rancher in Montana. When we went to visit, the backroads there and even the towns were like time machines. It was like rewinding to a Depression-era America, a 1930s America, when sodas came in bottles, and they were sold from machines on local store porches.
So that this old machine on this old porch of this old backroad store became a window, onto a past which is equally mine and the nation's.