Small-Town Living--Best/Not Best:Top 10 Reasons
1. People say “hello” on the street and smile at you, even if they don’t know you. You see many of the same people for years, and even if you don’t ever know their names, you’d recognize them if you ran into them in New York City. It would be old home week, even without names. Life is kind of a common experience, so you could engage in a long conversation with them about happenings in town, and you’d both know exactly what you meant.
2. Children can play in their front yards, in most cases, without fear of dire results. Your grandchildren can go next door without invitations (and without fear) to play on the huge play set.
3. The whole town turns out for ball games and parades. The woman sitting next to you, whose name you barely know, might give you good-natured lessons in loud whistling. She would check on your progress when you saw her in the grocery store later, and you could hide behind the cereal display and perform for her. She might tell you to practice more.
4. You can see the stars—lots of stars.
5. You see wild animals—foxes, coyotes, snakes, skunks, armadillos, raccoons, deer. Once in a while, you run into a roadrunner on the sidewalk, and you both almost have a heart attack. You can hear owls and doves and all kinds of other birds. A possum might eat your cat food, and a beaver might show up in your garage; a flock of early-morning turkeys could have breakfast in your front yard.
6. If you lock your keys in your car or have a flat tire or drop your armload or have a heart attack, somebody will help you without pay.
7. A woman can go to the grocery store after dark without being afraid.
8. You have traffic jams for only five minutes at the two major intersections. You don't have to sit in traffic on bound-up "free"ways. It takes about three to ten minutes to get to work, depending on which side of town you live on.
9. At the grocery store, you can buy extra already-sacked food for five or ten dollars to give to the food drives for the needy.
10. At the public library, a kind woman everybody knows does story hour for children in the summer.
The top ten reasons why small town living is NOT best:
1. You have to go to the next town to find a Wal-Mart if you want Mueslix cereal or anything else out of the ordinary.
2. You have only one grocery store; sometimes they don’t have eye-of-round roasts, and they certainly don’t have Mueslix. You are held captive by their prices.
3. Many small businesses owned by people you know have died because of the Wal-Mart phenomenon.
4. If you have a medical emergency, such as a heart attack over the roadrunner, they have to send a helicopter to fly you to the nearest big city for treatment. They can usually stabilize you first at the hospital emergency room in the next small town.
5. You have five-minute traffic jams at the two major intersections.
6. The public library might be open only three days a week.
I know; that's only six. I couldn’t think of ten reasons, so you just have to deal with six.
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