During the week, it is often easy to forget how hard it is to be away from home. Between school work, tutoring, spending time with friends and running errands you are too busy to think of anything other than the here and now. Unfortunately, when the dust settles and Friday comes around, it becomes all too easy to remember what you have left behind.
I grew up in a small town about an hour away from New York City. We have two stop lights (which basically makes traffic terrible) and about a 100 pizza shops. If you're not from Washingtonville, you have probably never heard of it. And unless you live there, you will likely never hear about it again.
Washingtonville is an enigma; close enough to cities to not be a true farm town; rural enough that no one will look to Washingtonville to be a paradigm of culture. Many of my peers spent their entire childhoods dreaming about how to get out of this town. Even I wasn't a stranger to dreaming about getting out and away (I applied to schools as far away as Kansas). But now, even I have to admit, I really miss Washingtonville.
Don't get me wrong, I love college. My friends from Le Moyne are amazing and the on-campus community is so accepting and fun. But come Saturday afternoon, sometimes all that I want is to go home.
Here is what I miss about Washingtonville:
I am never bored because I never expect to have plans.
In college, we are always busy. If there isn't anything going on at that second, there will be in an hour or so. Unfortunately, that means that when there is an absence of activity, the absence is realized more fully. In Washingtonville, nothing is ever happening, nor will there ever be anything happening. In other words we had to find ways to occupy ourselves and couldn't depend on the constant motion of our college campus to keep our minds occupied.
I always see familiar faces.
When I am home I always complain about the fact that I am constantly seeing people I know in public. But when I am at school, in a city that I do not know very well, I miss seeing people I know at the grocery store. And I especially miss seeing that amazing family that I babysit for randomly at church (you know who you are).
I am not constantly surrounded by other college students.
Let's face it college students are not all that interesting. Even though they all come from different backgrounds, they are all generally from the same generation. Especially at a small school like Le Moyne, it can be difficult to access different variations of perspectives, based on generations, from people other than the faculty. Occasionally I feel like, if I do not see a sassy old lady, a cute baby or an obnoxious ten-year-old, I will go crazy. Washingtonville has a much better ratio of old people, to adults, to adolescents, to kids, to babies.
And most of all, I miss that:
My family was always only a few rooms away.
This needs no real explanation.
