City folks just don't get it

I grew up in a village surrounded by farm land, but I've been living in the suburbs of a big city since about halfway through my college years. In my hometown I roamed neighborhood streets without lane markings and ventured into a few locally-owned Main Street shops. My landscape now is four-lane roads and shopping centers with stores piled upon stores.

A student who received her degree at Sunday's commencement invited me to her graduation party tonight in her hometown. The celebration required driving about forty miles into the countryside, which isn't really that far although I hedged a little when contemplating whether to go. (I felt I should be there and am glad I attended, but that's irrelevant for the post's purpose.)

Seeing the flat fields and small towns along the way reminded me of where I'm from and how different life must be in the agricultural regions than it is in the city, even with not that much space separating the two. There was something thrilling about cutting through the country parallel to train tracks and disappointing in observing the crumbling burgs' downtowns.

I got to thinking about what these places have in common and composed a brief list:

-A Dairy Queen-like local business that sells ice cream, hamburgers, fries, and the like. The most important feature is a sign in the form of a soft serve ice cream cone with a curlicue.

-Local restaurants and/or bars whose signs feature the carbonated or alcoholic beverage served in type that is larger and more stylized (ie., a logo) than the establishment's name, which is usually in a small, basic font.

-A front yard packed with folk art for sale.

During the trip I spotted a Mail Pouch Barn, needed to readjust to driving on uncomfortably narrow and unlined county and township roads, and reflected on how different the college where I work and nearby city must seem to students who come from these areas. I may have grown up in a village, but the suburbs and Dayton were closer than comparable places are to where I was tonight.

Having been in the Columbus area for so long, where I'm from is now kind of foreign to me. For freshmen who live in small towns and come here for college, I can only imagine how much the reverse must be true.