A Week Off

Spring Break was a good chance to recover from the stresses of the life of a college freshman, but it was also a great chance to reflect on how I've changed since I started college.

My favorite time to be in my hometown has always been at night. Driving back home from a trip with the warm street lights guiding the way and going outside to look up at the stars at night are two of my most vivid childhood memories associated with my small town. Now that I've gotten older I spend more time walking my dog around town when I'm home, but I'd never thought as much about it as I had this week. Everytime I walked downtown, I saw my town a lot differently. I saw how the heights of the buildings compared to each other and how obvious it was when some of the buildings were built when compared to the ones nearby and just how easy it would be to tell what some of their functions were even if I hadn't grown up knowing. I also saw the knew businesses that rented the old spaces. I saw the changes that'd been made since I last paid attention. I tried very hard to see the shops as a visitor might, I saw where my friends from college would want to take pictures for their Instagrams and I saw the shops they'd want to go into.

I was pretty tired of my town when I left. A lot of it had to do with the people there, I was ready to hear different perspectives. I was tired of the same arguments over the same things and hearing about what I considered the town traditions being shut down. It'd been a while since I'd enjoyed the annual Pig Out Festival the way I knew it as a child, I was tired of football and basketball getting all the upgrades when my soccer team only had the junior high boys' old locker room to borrow briefly before games and our theatre flooded so often our workshop was nicknamed The Bat Cave and the costume room was only known as The Swamp. I never understood how any of that was fair, but going back with it seeming a little less like the town I grew up in made me get it.

Football and basketball are what brought people in. There wasn't much choice in upgrading those because that's what the citizens of the town cared about. Both the stadium and the arena can hold tournaments and those give almost every business in town some sort of revenue. Fixing a small theatre would've made life a bit easier for some janitors and fine arts teachers, but at the end of the day it's still a small theatre with a fraction of the amount of interactions people will have with it. The issue with the soccer team is similar, it doesn't really hurt us to not have our own locker room, not enough people came to see us for us to afford that sort of luxury when all the facts are on the table but we do play on the football field so when the stadium is updated at least we don't look trashy compared to schools with more funding, we can hold our heads a little higher on the turf than on the grass. And the Pig Out may no longer be my summer tradition, but a Munchin on Mainstreet Fair started last year and it may be even better. The location is much more visible than the fairgrounds, the food trucks give much more variety, and the small businesses nearby get a lot more attention. Also, it was fun to go to. I wish I'd brought my friends with me, I also wished I had the guts to try the rockwall they set up. I hadn't felt that at the Pig Out before, but this new thing they're trying brought a life to the town that I had stopped seeing. The spaces mattered, the worn-down buildings were cute, people were there, I got it.