March 12, 2003

This is my hometown.

A Christian school's production of Stuart Little made the front page of my home town's newspaper this week. For lunch, the elementary school is serving up a breakfast sandwich or spaghetti with sauce, vegetable, and make your own Sundae! Someone is selling firewood (hard, dry, cut, split, and delivered!), and there's a meeting of the Blockhouse Quilters at the Parish house, tomorrow morning at 9:00. A woman wrote an article about how thrilled she was to see the first flock of Red Breasted Robins in the willow tree in her front yard.

The "local" section features students who made the Dean's List at Lafayette College, a middle school production of The Secret Garden, and several articles urging readers to "Think Spring". A writer's workshop is being held at the Congregational Church throughout March and April (learn to write your memoirs!), and the fire department is looking for someone to donate a used shed, or the cash or materials with which to build one (and they'll be sure to keep us updated on the project's progress!). A donation box has been set up for the local troubled boy's Farm at the recycling center. The high school cheerleading squad finished fourth in the Western State Division. The Snowmobile Club is holding a dance at the Legion on the 22nd to raise money for this year's high school graduating class. If you enjoy cribbage, you're urged to show up at the Methodist Church on Monday at 7:00 (bring your favorite board!).

And a local boy was deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan, to support the mission of Operation Enduring Freedom (the article goes on to remind readers what, exactly, that is).

Reality has a very hard time creeping into my home town. The troubles of the world are fiercely held at bay. Only when a boy we know, whom we babysat, whose science fair project we judged, whose parents go to our church, who pumped our gas at the store on the corner - only when we hear that he's being shipped off to some foreign, unknowable, unknown place we can barely point out on a map (it's just "away"), is it remembered that Home is still part of the rest of the world.

I've gotta say, I like it that way. Because the Phoenix paper's front page articles are entitled "Serbian Leader Killed in Ambush", "11 Die in Military Helicopter Crash in NY", "Violence Seeps into Grade Schools", and "Decapitated 1-Year-Old, 2 Other Dead Found in Texas Home".

I spend my days living in a box, working in a box, and rarely venturing more than five miles away from my house. Life and its tasks are pursued at a breakneck speed - head down, going going going. I worry about Marie simply walking to and from the bus stop every day. A girl was raped in her own home not three miles away from where I live. Sirens are a constant background noise - fire, police, ambulance. Very little of the food I buy at the grocery store was actually grown in the state. There are no seasons - just Hot and Not As Hot. I have eight houses directly neighboring mine, and I only know the names of the occupants of two.

Watching the local news is an exercise in depression and horror.

My childhood was full of baked bean dinners hosted in the elementary school gym, which proceeds went to buy more books for the children's library. The Strawberry Festival every July, the Clam Festival every August, the County Fair every September, the Farm Harvest every October. Home invasions referred to mice, not men; a car jacking was what you did when you got a flat. If you and your wife were having problems, a meal with the minister and his wife solved most (and the whole town knew by the weekend what your business was). Every mom was a soccer mom, a Girl Scout leader, a Pony Club mom, a 4-H mom. Violence took the form of a drunken dare to shoot the beer can off your buddy's head with his bow, or a snowmobile falling through the ice because some idiot figured the ice was thick enough even before the first snow fall, or the occasional brawl over a dart game at the only bar within twenty miles - which got you kicked out for a month, until you were bored enough to beg re-admittance.

Everybody had their own garden, and neighbors traded their explosion of tomatoes for your explosion of zucchini. If you were a kid lucky enough to live up north in Aroostook county, you got two weeks off from school in September to help bring in the potato harvest. Kids went home before dark on Saturday, in order to have their baths in preparation for church on Sunday. Any other time, you couldn't get them to come in until dinner. Instead of worrying if your child would be snatched or raped or killed, you worried that they'd fall off the barn roof or get lost in the woods. The sheriff would stop by for coffee, and you knew the mailman by name (he drives a jeep, and sits on the passenger side - he reaches across for the steering wheel, but he rigged the pedals so he could drive from the right). The guy who plows the driveways asks the kids where they want him to put the snowbanks, so they can make forts. Elderly women pay him in warm cookies and muffins and pies, and he's got the belly to prove it.

Italian sandwiches, mere moments away. Summer cookouts, and fireflies. The smell of the ocean. Roadside fruit and vegetable stands. Trees - the climbing kind. Frogs singing in the pond. Chasing the neighbor's goats out of the garden. Startling deer in the back yard. Night skies thick with stars. Fresh air. Teeny wild strawberries growing wild in the lawn. Picking blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, from the bushes that grow everywhere. Lilacs. Hardwood floors. Wood burning stoves. The silence of the woods after a snow storm. The teeny one-room town library. Oak-lined roadways. Leaves that change colors. Stopping in the middle of the road to talk to a friend passing in the other direction - and never having to move for traffic. Barefootedness. Recipe exchanges. Laying on the grass and finding shapes in the clouds. A slow, steady pace.

I do recall the feet of snow, scraping inches of ice off my windshield, driving 45 minutes to the nearest grocery store, the horrific economy, and mud season. I do like the convenience of where I live now, the mountains in the distance, the wonderful home we worked so hard for, the fact that a paycheck is available to me, and the lack of weatherly drama. But...

But.

If we moved away from Arizona, what would I miss? Besides friends and family, I am hard put to think of anything, really. Good Mexican food, maybe. But nothing here satisfies my soul the way Maine does.

Except for Calvin, of course.

When I moved away, I couldn't wait to get away from the simple life. Now, I'm dying to get it back again. There's too much reality in my life. I wanna go home.

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©Laura Charon 2000 - 2003.