I was born in a small town

Thursday, Nov. 06, 2003
7:00 PM

I grew up in a small town in a very rural area of central Virginia. There is one high school in the county and when I was there, there were about 650 kids there. My graduating class was about 125. Everybody knows everybody else and their business. Whenever I go home to visit my parents, my mom catches me up on all the news on people I went to school with or otherwise knew growing up. Who's working where, who's gotten married, who's had kids. Who's gotten sick, and sometimes, who's died.

It often feels weird to me when I go home and run into people from my past. I never really thought about where I would end up after I finished college - never thought about whether I would go back home or what. I ended up moving up here to Northern Virginia, but lots of kids moved back home. My sister's lived up in this area for a number of years but now she's living with my parents, in the same house where we grew up. She's planning to buy a house at some point, and she's already looked at one in Shipman, which is even smaller than the town where my parents live.

A guy who went to our high school is now a real estate agent. He showed her the house, which is owned by another guy we went to school with. The people who are currently renting the house are relatives of the owner, and my sister went camping with them over the summer. As she was telling me all this, I was thinking "Small world..." But I didn't say it because, well, it really is a small world where I come from.

I don't really know where I'm going with all this. I just always think about this stuff when I go home. Now my sister's back there and I never thought that she would be happy living out in the country, even though she has done so for a while. I wonder whether she'll stay there or move to Charlottesville. She has friends in both places, and of course she'll be closer to our parents. There was a point where I wouldn't have thought she'd be happy living with our folks, either, but maybe she's grown out of that. She needs a support system right now.

I love that I grew up where I did. It's quiet, safe and peaceful. I love going home to visit my folks and relax. But I don't think I'd want to live there anymore. I hate the traffic here, and all the people and crowds, and how much it costs to live here. But I love the opportunities here, to learn, to try new things. I have tons of friends. I have lots of sources for supplies to feed my arts habits. I think I'd be bored living where I grew up, now. But I sometimes wonder who I'd be, what path I'd be walking, if I'd stayed there. I think, in some ways, my world would be smaller. Safer, but smaller.

They say you can't go home again. In some ways that's true, but in other ways, you can. My sister has, because she needed to. I'm here, because this is where I need to be.