A Future as Bright as City Lights一 Val’s Story
By: Erin Stevens
It’s another Saturday morning at the Fulton Farmers Market. The first morning in weeks where the temperature has dipped below 80 degrees and the air finally sits at a tolerable humidity level, meaning the summer farmer’s market season is coming to an end.
Amidst the chatter of late morning market-goers and the echo of crushed ice being scooped into plastic cups soon to be filled with Local Motive Cold Brew, Val, a Wildflyer barista, talks about her experience with homelessness.
“I just remember most nights wondering where my next meal would come from,” Val says, shaking her dyed, pink-hued hair out of her eyes. “Or where I’d get water, or use the bathroom or take a shower.”
Homelessness for Val started at age 18 and continued off and on over the last five years. She says her anger management issues were what led to her being kicked out of her home. It’s difficult to picture her as angry. As Val perches atop a cooler beneath the Wildflyer tent at the farmer’s market, openly and willingly sharing her story, she seems so incredibly calm and go-with-the-flow.
After she was forced to leave home, Val was on the move. She’s lived as far north as Grand Rapids, MN, spent time in South Carolina and even walked all the way from South Carolina to Atlanta, GA. For most of her life, though, she’s been in the Twin Cities--specifically Minneapolis. It was when Val was living in downtown that she wrote her heartfelt and heartbreaking poem, “City Lights.”
Inspired by the city’s unrelenting fluorescent and chaotic glow, no matter where Val tried to sleep, she couldn’t escape them.
“We didn’t have tents, so we’d sleep downtown wherever we could find a place, and we’d get whatever sleep we could before the cops would tell us to move on,” she says, referring to herself and her partner, Michael. “If we were lucky, we could take cover in an abandoned building, but most often I’d wake up on city benches or at the metro transit area where we’d always have the city lights beaming down on us. Everywhere we went, there they were.”
The lights didn’t just make it difficult for Val to sleep, they were a frustrating, painful reminder of what seemed to be just out of her reach一 a safe place to rest her head, to feel at peace. To feel at home.
But now things are looking up for Val一 brighter, you could say. She’s been employed with Wildflyer Coffee for over a month now, first working the Saturday morning markets and now barista-ing part-time thanks to a new partnership between Wildflyer and Butter Bakery Cafe. She also has safe, stable housing一 walls and a roof and a sanctuary to call home. With both solid employment and a place of her own, Val’s allowing herself to think ahead, to make plans, to be hopeful.
“I want to see the ocean,” she says with a smile. “I want to go to Bali and Paris. I want to see the world.” Val also wants to start her own art, craft-related business一 something that allows her to fully explore her creativity and make things with her own hands.
And how does she feel about those city lights now?
“When I’m walking downtown, I don’t hate them anymore,” Val says. “Now I can just go home and go to sleep, and I don’t have to worry about them. They’re a reminder of where I was and who I’ve become. Every time I pass by old spots I camped at, I humble myself, and I’m grateful that I don’t have to worry about the glare of the city lights anymore.”