Comment on Arianna’s home

A balloon floats over the parking lot at the Pine Tree Shopping Center. Lowe’s is bustling with customers leaving with home-improvement supplies in their pickup trucks and SUVs. Just beyond the garden center’s shrink-wrapped pallets of mulch and landscaping stone, a narrow dirt pathway borders a field of overgrown weeds and winds around a large boulder, into a stand of trees. This has been 5-year-old Arianna’s home for the past month. Her mother, Chrissy Chavez, and Chavez’s boyfriend, Troy Jethro, moved Arianna to Portland from Florida with the promise of jobs and a new start.