Goin' to Town

I was born and raised in a large, sprawling, metropolitan area. If I had shopping to do and errands to run, it usually meant spending several hours and driving many miles.

Now I live in a very, very small town. It takes us about ten minutes to get to town from our house, but once we're there, we can take care of business licketysplit. Within five small blocks, we can stop at the grocery store, the liquor store, our accountant, the post office, the hardware store and the bank. We're usually home in a half hour. The dogs are sometimes disappointed when they come along for the ride. They expect more of an outing.

Goin' to town is sometimes the only time we see other people. We live out in the country, and while we have neighbors, we have acres between us and sometimes go for days without seeing anyone else. Goin' to town is our social life. Chatting with the clerks at the grocery store, hearing the latest gossip from the bank manager, getting the scoop on lake fishing from the owner of the hardware store - this is how we keep in touch with the outside world. We don't go to town every day, though. My husband and I both enjoy the solitude of our new Idaho life, and mainly prefer to huddle and putter in and around our hermitage.

Two or three times a month, we need to buy or do something that we can't buy or do in our very, very small town. This requires us to go the big city. CdA. Coeur d'Alene. 40,000 people. Wow. Traffic and stop lights. Big parking lots. There's even a freeway running through CdA. We avoid the freeway. We carefully plan our trips to the big city so we can be as efficient as possible and get back to our very, very small town as quickly as we can.

We do love the fact that we have a city fairly close to us that has just about every store that we could possibly patronize, but after a few hours of driving and shopping and standing in lines, our energy is drained and we ache to get back to life in a very, very small town.