Town

My husband asked me to go into town to mail a letter. Sounds simple enough.

But which town?

Living in the country, such as we do, "town" is nebulous at best. First there is the tiny little town which is our mailing address. It has a small (over priced) grocery store, post office, gas station-- oh! two gas stations, school, and four-way stop. Oh yeah.

The next closest town is about 15 minutes away and has considerably more. There are several "mom and pop" restaurants, fast food, bank, Wal-Mart, and prison. Oh! Two prisons. This is where I usually head as I can also visit the library (which I must pay to belong to since we actually live in another county!) or drop off dry cleaning. Exciting stuff like that.

Then there is the small city/big town we go to once a week for the baby's physical therapy. It's 45 minutes or so away, but boasts several shopping centers, a small mall, a few craft stores, one electronics store, book store, and lots of services and such.

And the grand finale-- the city. A real cit-- small compared to say, Chicago, but it has sky scrappers and traffic jams and everything. We go there for BIG craft stores, big malls, the children's hospital, Babies R Us, nice restaurants, movie theaters, and Christian bookstores. Obviously its not where I'll go to mail a letter though :-).

So chose carefully. Going to town is a big deal.

Small Town Life

In the big city you've got shopping districts, movie theaters, parks and play groups, and who knows what all else. In a small town you've got... the small town festival.

Not that I'm dissing it or anything. I look forward to the local parade (especially the tootsie rolls thrown in an election year!), seeing school girls tap dance, and buying baked goods from the local Cub Scouts. Its fun to see everyone mixing and mingling on the town square and smelling the corn dogs sold out of those trailer-like stands. I like porkburgers and Dr. Pepper, sports teams painting little kids' faces, and all those crafts...

And this year I was one of those craft booths! I took a display board with samples of my custom scrapbook pages uptown and tried to convince passer-byers that I'm selling the service of making their scrapbook, not a product! It was fun, hot, and hopefully productive (and if your curious you can check out my website)!

My son had a good time looking all around with Grandma and Aunt Katie, although I don't think he had as much fun on the merry-go-round as we had hoped. He, unlike me, also does not like porkburgers. Oh well. Brian stood on the corner talking to other farmers about the moistuer level of the corn and who is harvesting and how much. He does like porkburger.

So while it may not have been as educational as an afternoon at the art gallery or enthralling as the latest fashions--I sincerely mean it when I say it was fun.