The short goodbye

Last night my husband and I took a walk down memory lane to our favorite restaurant downtown and after that, to the little ice cream shop next to the town square.  It was a beautiful night, windy and warm (but not hot) and we sat on the edge of the fountain in the square, ate our ice cream, and reminisced about what this place was like 20 years ago, when we both first arrived. 

We talked about Eiseman’s Hardware Store.  The Kings Mall.  Peden’s.  All places which no longer exist anyplace but our memories. 

Back in those days, this town was a real Mayberry.  The tree-lined streets downtown were safe, there was no graffiti to be found anyplace, and you could easily see the Milky Way from your backyard at night, because the town had less than 20,000 people and there just weren’t that many lights.  It was small-town paradise.

So we talked about this town, and we talked about what happened here that changed it all.  About how the lower-end growth has killed what it used to be, and replaced it with something not as appealing as before.

 I will miss this town – as it was.  But the fact is, I don't fit in here anymore, because as the town has grown, the socio-economic demographic has changed and I'm now in a severe minority.  I don't even speak the predominant language anymore, so music in stores, billboards, conversations in the grocery aisles, etc. all now happen in a language I am not fluent in.  

Our city planners have also done a bang-up job of ruining the sweet, small-town flavor of this place.  They’ve lobbied for businesses in the lower end of the socio-economic scale to move in, convincing people that a WalMart or store like it meant jobs, and now we have the under-employment and poverty to prove it. Sure, these businesses brought in jobs – minimum wage jobs.  This would not bode well for the future of my children, if they were considering staying here, which thankfully they are not.  They will go off to college and will not return to this town, because they will become too well-trained and educated to find meaningful work here. Very sad.

So we took one last look over what this town is now, and one longing look at what we remember about it.  We will leave in 28 more days, hopeful and optimistic as a new chapter in our lives starts. 

And I will miss what this town used to be.  But not what it has become.