As I enter the clearing with my guide, Steve, the trees part to reveal Rebecca’s living room.  There on the hard packed dirt, are two dilapidated recliners flanking a small table.  Rebecca sits in one.  Her dog, Sweet Pea, sits in the other.    The woman raises her eyes from the book she is reading and places it on the table beside her.  Steve introduces me and I shake Rebecca’s hand.  She offers me a seat and apologizes for the untidiness of her home.   I glance to my right and glimpse inside the parted folds of plastic that form the door, walls, and roof of her home.  A bare, tattered mattress has somehow been elevated off the floor.  More trash forms an uneven border along the inner edge of the tent.    Directly in front of Rebecca’s chair is an upended milk cart that serves as another table.  Paints and brushes have been carefully arranged around a partially finished painting on the small surface.  It is easy to see that the artist is in the process of capturing the wild hibiscus which surround her home.  It is equally evident that she possesses great talent and has been well trained in her craft.   We prepare to leave, but I have one request.   “Rebecca, your artwork is so beautiful.  May I take a picture of it?”   “Go ahead,” she says bashfully.  “But it is not finished.”   As I snap the picture she wistfully says, “I wanted to be an art teacher.  I was only one course away from my degree.  All I needed was Art History.”   “What stopped you?”  I ask.   “My husband got a DUI and we had to leave town.  That was it.  I never got to go back (to college) after that.”   I am silent.  I can find nothing to say that does not seem insensitive…trite.   Then, my guide says what I wanted to say most of all but for which I lacked the courage.   “And that changed the course of your life,” he says.   Yes.  Once she dreamt of creating beauty and teaching children to do the same.  Now, she sleeps on a discarded mattress in Tent City.  What dreams can be dreamt there?    That afternoon, I wait on my own front porch to greet my children upon their return home from school.  The bus stops in front of my home and the doors open to deliver all five children home, safe and sound.  My six year old son hits the ground running and reaches me first.  He climbs into my lap and I hold him close.  Then, I bury my face into his neck and pray.  I ask God to never let my little boy become so addicted that he is lost to me, or become so mentally ill that he wanders away into the world of delusion and need.  I pray that he will never suffer such loss in life that he finds himself incapable of rebounding from it.    I ask God to never let my little boy find his living room underneath the trees, and his bed a barren mattress in a shelter constructed of whatever he can glean from the trash of others.   “Please, God.”  I ask.  “Never let my little boy live in Tent City.  Let him always, always have a home.   Sherri Gragg is a free lance writer who was honored to be welcomed into the homes of the residents of Tent City.  She resides with her husband and five children in Franklin, Tennessee. The Tennessean September 28, 2008