The Hometown

I grew up, from six months old to 21 years old, in a town of less than 25,000 people. Twenty-five thousand doesn’t sound real small, but compared to my current home, with almost 100,000 thousand people, and around 1,000,000 people in the greater metropolitan area, it’s small. And then, comparing my current town to something like New York, with a population of over 8,000,000 people, I still live in a podunk.

The median household income in my hometown is around $26,000. The median household income in my current town is around $77,000. Interestingly, the median household income in New York is only around $43,000. (And the cost of living is lower in my Southland area!)

I currently live only two hours away from my hometown, so I’m able to visit fairly often. My family still lives there, so we have always tried to visit at least every couple months. Sometimes several months pass without a visit, and sometimes we go a couple times in one month. Recent circumstances have brought me to the hometown often over the past few weeks. (See my mid-August posts for the reason.)

Visits to the hometown are usually fun and interesting, and I find the days and events full of blogging potential. Heck, I could post a week about the just two and a half hours we spent at the county fair. I see so many interesting (to me) things to mention, explain, and talk about.

Daily life in my current town can be so routine and mundane. Many nights, I have to think really hard for something to post about from my day, because a normal, routine day can just flash by. Funnily, a non-normal day tends to be the most stressful. As the old Chinese curse says, “May you live in interesting times.” “Interesting” things happening in my otherwise normal day tend to be . . . difficult.

A weekend in my hometown, on the other hand, almost always has an interesting situation or occurrence. It’s the fact that time in my hometown is not my normal routine that makes almost every hour something interesting.

Because I’ve been spending more time in my hometown lately, and I find so many interesting things while there, I’ll be posting more observations from Smalltown, Southernstate. These observations won’t be all my posts, but they will be more common than they have been.

And in case some of my observations come across as negative, I want it known that I love my old hometown. But I do see a vast difference between where I’ve been since I grew up there, where I am now, and what the old, small, poor hometown was and is. It’s that contrast that strikes me as so interesting.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com