25TH STREET

By Sydney Salter


Photography: The Salt Project

Sometimes I take my laptop to Grounds for Coffee on 25th Street in Ogden to sip a latte and write. I look out the window and think of my grandpa riding his tricycle on these sidewalks circa 1915; I think about him as a teenager clerking at the Marion Hotel named for his big sister. I think about the farm, the apartment buildings, and the hotel that my great-grandfather lost in the Great Depression, scattering our family across the West. I like how the hotel is now a home for other people down on their luck. And here I am back on 25th Street in Ogden sitting in a coffee shop so I can be close to my grandpa, my favorite storyteller, as I write my own.


Sydney Salter won second place in the 2018 Utah Original Writing Competition Novel category for “Thoughts And Prayers,” honorable mention for her young-adult book “My Big Nose and Other Natural Disasters” in 2007, and first in the juvenile book category for “Not a Doctor Logan’s Divorce Book”  in 2004.