my little town

i grew up surrounded by my relatives on a big family ranch south of denver. we were situated between 2 towns, small and smaller. one was the home of my elementary school, the general store where we loved to buy candy, and a very cool art deco truckstop where we occasionally had dinner. the larger town was more cosmopolitan (never has the meaning of that word been stretched further), with 2 drugstores, a couple of grocery stores, gas stations, a liquor store owned and operated – apparently without irony – by my drivers ed teacher. there were several restaurants, the high school, and the county courthouse, populated largely with officials i was related to. my parents had grown up friends with most of the business owners. i’m not sure what year it appeared, but by the time i was in junior high there was a single stoplight, and it may have been 15 years before there was a 2nd. in many ways it was the quintessential small town, and the usual things happened there: the county fair, school plays and pageants, bowling tournaments, church events. there was the time our neighbor brutally murdered his wife, the time my grade school friend derailed a train, the time a teenage girl threw a firebomb into the courthouse and burned it to the ground. you know, typical small town stuff. kind of.

i moved away for college and then settled back in denver. in the mid-90′s i watched my hometown start growing at an alarming rate. the new town fathers loved the increased tax revenue, and it seemed to become a sprawling, unplanned suburb before anyone realized what was happening. the small-town vibe wavered and was quickly disappearing until the 2000′s, when downtown and main street were made over as ‘charming, quaint and historic’. ironic that people destroyed the original and then attempted to recreate it as a marketing tool.

after my parents died and i inherited the house where i grew up, i began spending more time around my old town. i was annoyed by the growth, the traffic, the ugly mish-mash of cheap townhomes and developments, but have to admit it was nice to have some of the modern conveniences close to home. i was no longer stuck if i forgot something in denver – everything i needed was 10 minutes away. still, i missed the simplicity, the quiet streets, knowing almost everyone you saw. i even missed the days when we would have given anything to have a mcdonalds – there are two now. modern conveniences, yes. bland, cookie-cutter big box stores that make it seem like anywhere, u.s.a., not so much. sadly it seems one does not exist without the other.

then, a series of circumstances and i found myself moving back, permanently. i’m in denver almost daily, but unexpectedly find myself taking more and more advantage of things close by. yet i sometimes feel melancholy for the way it once was. then a surprising event – or rather, a series of events – happened shortly after i moved. i went to the courthouse to change my drivers license and car registration –  the entire process took less than 20 minutes. in denver it would have taken longer to find a parking spot. i went to the bank and realized i was in line next to my junior high biology teacher (who also happens to be my cousin). one evening, driving through the supermarket parking lot, i came around a row of cars to see the lane blocked by 2 guys in their late teens, in full cowboy regalia, spinning their lasso’s in the air trying to rope a small sawhorse dolled up to look like a calf. i’d seen this sort of thing many times as a kid, on the ranches of friends. most of the ranches are gone now, so here they were, obliviously blocking an entire traffic line to practice their skills. oddly enough, no one seemed to mind. we just slowed down, carefully drove around the scene, and waved at the cowpokes as they waited for a break in traffic so they could spin their lassos again. in that moment i could feel the spirit that was there when i grew up, the comforting innocence and slow simplicity that i remember, and i realized: the little town hasn’t really come so far after all.

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