Where Everybody Waves
Most of us leave an ant trail. We take the same route to work and then back home again... day after day after day. We have a spot where we grab a coffee, a market where we shop for food, a pew we sit on at church. We have a handful of restaurants where we like to eat, a place where we prefer to get gas, a corner where we buy ice cream. You could jab the spike of a compass at our home address and stretch the pencil arm to trace an arc that delineates the territory where we roam. Occasionally we venture out, but mostly this is where we “live.” In cities of 100,000... 500,000... 2.5 million, we hang out in our own zones. Most of the houses we pass by look a lot like ours. Most of the cars in the drive-thru where we order our burgers and fries look a lot like ours. It’s like the weather in San Diego: every season is the same.
But in small towns we’re exposed to it all. The house with the torn-up screen door hanging crooked from one hinge is just around the corner from the house with the circle drive and two rocking chairs bookending a fern on the stately front porch. The road to the local library passes a residence surrounded by Johnson grass encroaching the backyard clothesline that’s loaded down with laundry hanging from a wire tightly stretched between two leaning poles. Directly behind the unkemptness is the well-manicured corner lot of the First United Methodist Church. The full, the empty, the colorful, the gray sit side by side by side.
Proximity makes it hard to forget how other people live.
I grew up in rural Oklahoma. Healdton was an oilfield town of about 3,500-- back in the days when the black gold bubbled and pump jacks were common along the sides of the alleys we traipsed on our way to school. We didn’t think anything about a house with broken windows, or a yard that never got mowed, or the building with the roof that caved-in a decade ago and probably won’t ever be fixed. It was our town. Abject poverty and more-than-enough were neighbors. We passed each other every day.
In cities, though, we sometimes get screened-out. It can get easy to forget how the other half lives. The homeless camping out at a corner of a busy intersection seem like an anomaly. A have-not juxtaposed against a speeding stream of haves.
But in a small town, the well-off (usually only a family or two), the middle class, the one-car households, those who walk wherever they need to go and those who don’t walk much at all because they have nowhere to be, inhabit the same route. Small-town people know their homeless by name. Lives are intertwined.
Even though I haven’t lived in a rural town since I was 18, it’s as if I never left when I drive through one. I love a place where everybody waves. What I don’t love is the reminder of what once was and probably won’t ever be again. The desolation pains me. As does the unavoidable evidence of how hard it can be to simply get by. Yet, the familiar is so strong. The absence of pretense that wafts across the four-way stop is like perfume. Simple is a hard but tender way to live.
To be continued . . .we can only hope.