i'm from Sherrill, New York. i lived there in this house from age 4 to age 19. winters were spent making snowmen and snow tunnels out in the backyard and drinking hot cocoa and making forts in the dining room under the table with blankets and pillows. summers were spent at the community swimming pool that cost us 50 cents a day, getting really tan, and riding my bike.
i went to a closeminded high school that was 99% white. for variety we had one asian family and two east indians. oh yeah, and maybe 2 african-american kids. in the summertime, fresh air children would be sent to us from places like Syracuse.
notable neighborhood personalities include the following:
-vietnam man (he came home from 'Nam but never really left. wore a bandana and walked along the highway. had bonfires in his front yard sometimes.)
-mysterious and scary house way down the street (i lived on a dead end street and at the very end there was a horse farm. just before the very end there was a scary shack of a house and we never really knew if anyone lived there. we'd see a car parked out front sometimes but the lawn was never mowed and grew several feet high. one day, i was dared to knock on the door and i did. a very old woman answered and it smelled like pee and we got scared and ran.)
there wasn't really much to do for fun during my teen years. you could go see a movie in the next little town over - Oneida
(a 3 minute drive). Sherrill didn't have its own theater. Sherrill did have one pizza parlor, one ice cream parlor, one beauty parlor, a gas station, a grocery store and a mechanic. if you were a cool kid you probably went drinking in the woods somewhere. if you were a badass you drove 3 towns over to Utica and Carmella's Cafe and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes.
these days, Sherrill is dying. Oneida Limited, the major source of income for the smallest incorporated city in america, is doing poorly. my parents left New York two years ago and headed to North Carolina. the jobs are a bit more plentiful down there and the houses are huge and cheap as hell.
my only concern is that my family might acquire a southern accent. it has happened to everyone i know who has moved down there so we shall see.