I Just Wanted to Live in Town

I grew up in the country which meant gravel roads, no close neighbors, and long bus rides to and from school. Our farm was really only a couple of acres, but we did have a barn, so we occasionally had chickens and a calf or two. So, I did have farm chores.

This is a photo of me and two of my three sisters, all five years or more younger than I. Spending a lot of time on my own and with the help of a big imagination, I played pretend a lot. There was a woods beside our house where I pretended more than once to be a pioneer woman living in the wilderness. At other times, I was the sole survivor of some terrible accident or a hermit hiding away from the world.

Once, after peeking inside a very small mobile home, I spent hours perusing the Sears catalog, figuring out what I needed to furnish my own little trailer and how much it would cost. Every book I ever read contributed to the make-believe life I lived, separate and apart from my life with my family in the country.

When I started first grade in 1950, most of my friends rode on buses like I did, but a few lucky ones, in my eyes, got to walk to and from school because they lived in town. Town, to me, was a small village with a school for grades one through eight, two general stores, a post office, a telephone exchange, and at the edge of town along the highway, a small cafe. My town probably boasted of two hundred residents, at most. I wanted nothing more than to live in town, walk to and from school, and go to the store for a candy bar anytime I wanted. All I would have to do was tell the man behind the counter to "put it on my mother's ticket."

I learned about the world by reading, and I read anything I could get my hands on. My favorite books were about children my age, like the Bobbsey Twins who had friends come to their house to play and had all kinds of adventures in their neighborhood. I only had cousins who came to play when their mother visited my mother. My cousins were the age of my sisters, so they played with each other, not with me.

Because I went to a four room school, my junior high years were called the seventh and eighth grades. I knew, from books, that kids my age in a real town didn't attend school with first and second graders. They had schools with lockers for their coats and books, and groups of friends hung out around those lockers, laughing and joking. I didn't have a locker. I had a flip-top desk to hold my books, and I hung my coat on a hook on the back wall of the classroom. I even went to recess like the little kids!

I was desperate to be part of a group of kids my age who had fun together. I didn't want to live in some big city because I had no idea what a city was. I just wanted to live in town.

The county high school was in town, at least a larger town, and it was a forty minute bus ride every morning and afternoon. I could never take part in extra-curricular activities because I had to catch the bus.

And then I began to date a boy who lived in town. He never once remarked about me living way out in the country. When he picked me up for a date, took me back to town for a movie, and then delivered me home again, he never complained about spending sixty miles on the road. Once, when the bill from the gas station arrived, he did say his dad asked him how in the world he was using so much gas.

That guy and I married at the end of our first year of college. We later moved to Chicago for three years but never really took part in all the city's opportunities. I don't know if we were too young, too poor, too inexperienced, or just too intimidated by the city itself.

Finally, we settled in a town that was not too small, not too large, and definitely not a city. We made lots of friends and raised two children. Fifty-six years later, we're still here in our town. We live on an acre lot with woods behind our house, and we sometimes take summer drives on gravel roads just to "smell the corn growing." I will admit that memories of living in the country sometimes stir in my heart, but I have never once changed my mind about wanting to live in town.