There were nights where I wouldn’t come home until 6 am. There were nights when I thought it would be fun to stay up with the moon until he met the sun again. There were nights I would run the streets with my friends, stunned by all the city lights and night life that could captivate the attention of one human soul. Mornings where I would maybe have fifteen minutes between the city life I was trying to live and heading to work that morning that I would spend exchanging a simple “hi” and “bye” with my mother. The only person who genuinely cares how my day went and what it consisted of on a daily schedule. The only person who will stay up until my head safely hits a pillow at night, just to make sure I’m okay. Was it my sense of adventure? Was it the trait of deviancy?

Growing up, I moved nine times, eight of which were different houses. I got a little taste of the county life, the city life, and oh yes, the country life. I lived all over the greater St. Louis area, all the way out to Hillsboro, Missouri; and never did I change school districts. The county life was a pretty typical medium. I lived in the county a good majority of my life, and started referring to it as a wannabe city. It has a pretty large population; the traffic, it has the stores; strips of bars and little shops, it has the dress code; although maybe a little more relaxed business wear than one would wear in the city. There were a good amount of people you knew, but you didn’t run into someone you knew everywhere you went. The city life was relatively fast paced. The cops were laid back, everyone walked places, there was a mcdonalds right next to your house; you didn’t really know anyone, and rarely ran into someone you knew. The nice part about it was that there was always a new shop to explore, nightlife going on around you, anything you needed within a five mile range. However, the crime rates were high, the streets were roughly paved, there was always traffic, the houses were very close together, and if you didn’t like your neighbor; tough luck. We weren’t in the city for long.

I lived in the country when I was in elementary school. We started by moving in with my grandpa for a bit, who’s hand-built-from-scratch-wooden-log house sits on almost five acres of land. Anything from licensed John Deers’ to chicken farms, horses, livestock, barns, bonfires, fourwheelers, and a blank sky full of twinkling stars that light up the bed of a truck on a summer night. There’s not a whole lot of nightlife entertainment out in good ole’ hicktown, and the closest grocery store is probably twenty minutes from you, if you’re lookin’ to go to the good one in town. You can’t call Cassie from your front door step and meet her in 2 outside and walk a few blocks down to see what everyone’s doing. I didn’t live there long enough to make friends at the local high school, or to hangout with the country boys and girls who caught crawdads and snuck into silo’s late at night just for fun. I heard about it, but between the commute through the city to the county and the time it took to do homework and all that other stuff you have to do when you’re a kid, I barely had time to ride the fourwheeler through the mud puddles at the bottom of the hill. I mainly played activities with my brother, such as writing on the bricks surrounding the barn with the white rocks that made up the gravel road, or throwing the big red exercise ball up in the air and seeing how far the wind could carry it. We would pick flowers for fun, find worms to go fishing with at the pond down the road, and sometimes when John and Sharon from across the street were home we got to ride their horses and chase their chickens. It was a more laid back, down to earth, home cooked meals kind of living.

A few years later and you grow out of that little girl stage, and you want to run with the big kids. But your little legs can’t keep up, and after all that night life and all those city lights, you’re ready to climb into bed with a cozy blanket and a nice fire, with your mom right down the stairs incase you feel sick or get hungry. Instead, you crash at your girlfriend’s apartment with cold glass windows and harden wood floors; with an empty pantry that contains a couple bags of ramen noodles and maybe some budlight in the fridge. There’s nothing but the sound of traffic and loud drunk people yelling.

If you told me ten months ago that I’d be dating someone from Bowling Green, Missouri that worked on a chicken farm and an auto shop, and that I would be the city girl who wanted anything but to live and work in the city anymore, I would laugh at you. Now, if you told me I could have a free apartment in the city, with access to unlimited nightlife and sky line lights, meeting new business men and women (potential coworkers or partners) everyday, I would laugh at you.

There’s nothing now, that I’d want more than to live in a house in the middle of a big piece of land, with my trip to work consisting of cows and cornfields. Something about the smell of fresh air and the harvest season that makes me feel right at home. I think my new love for windmills maybe also plays a part in the transition from the city lights to the country nights; you can’t really build a windmill in front of your apartment when you share a yard with the police station and nearby college university, and brad from downstairs owns half of your little corner of grass.

I guess what I’m trying to say is there’s nothing wrong with straying from your roots. When you’re five years old you don’t know the difference, when you’re eighteen years old, you’ve experienced the difference, and by the time you hit your twenties, you can evaluate the difference and be on your way to paving the roots of your little ones, the way you now would’ve wanted yours to have been.