“I hate this stupid town and everyone in it.” – 16 year old me.
“I’m never coming back.” – 19 year old me.
“I miss the stars at night.” – 30 year old me.
“But I’ve built my life in the city. I’m not going back.” – 36 year old me.
“I’m scared and I’m tired.” – 39 year old me.
Two months after burying my dad, I packed up my home in the city and moved back to my hometown. Rural Northeastern Arizona. Population 3,424 as of the 2020 census. The place I swore I would never return to live. The place I hated all through adolescence. Where the fashion trends are ten years behind the rest of the world, and no one really cares about fashion trends anyway. Where the same last names have appeared on the plaques of city council members for generations. Where gossip runs rampant and everyone knows everyone else’s business. Where the police stop people for minor traffic infractions because there’s rarely any other crime to enforce.
I recall when the initial adrenaline and first year of grief had passed, like coming up for air having been taken out to sea by a riptide, the shoreline somehow foreign from so far away. With a sinking feeling, I realized I ran right back to a town I swore never to return to, without a clear plan for the future, or how I would begin to rebuild my life. All the ways I hadn’t healed from the past had become my present, and I was standing in the deepest reconciliation of self I had ever experienced. That my friends were taking dance classes and attending sound baths and going out to clubs on the weekends while I sat at home, alone. Divorce, a pandemic, a parent’s terminal cancer diagnosis, death. My life fell apart, so I ran to the one place that felt like home. My family was overjoyed when I broke the news I was moving back. My friends were cautiously supportive. One group celebrated my return, the other hesitated at the thought that I would leave.
And I sat in silence while my friends in the city trash talked the town, laughed about how tiny it was, how backward, how corrupt, how devoid of culture and nightlife. Ordinary, boring, out of touch, irrelevant. Nothing good to say and nothing good to see. I stayed silent because it had only been a few months before I would have joined in and said the same. Like a child of divorce listening to one parent denigrate the other, I couldn’t help but feel the criticism of the town was a criticism of me. The unspoken words were how could you live in that awful place?
Coming home has changed something fundamental within me. I’ve had to wrench myself free of my long-held belief that everyone who stayed in town after high school had been frozen in time, stuck. I walked back into town with a sense of superiority having seen the world and experienced the wonders of other cities, states, cultures. Only to realize how little the city life understands of the rural life. How out of touch with community and cooperation a person can become, lost in a sea of millions of citizens too busy to notice and too isolated within the rush to care. Living in a large house on an acre of land, it seems so silly to ever think living stacked on top of other humans was an ideal existence. My mind needed the space as much as my lungs needed the clean air.
The city favors individualism, the small town favors the collective. A striking juxtaposition with voting patterns where city voters tend to be more liberal and small towns more conservative. Their ways of living are so opposite their political leanings. You can laugh at any local Facebook community page – what was that loud boom, someone’s dog is loose on main street, yard sale Saturday. But there was something more important happening on this community’s local Facebook page. A surprisingly common use of first person plural pronouns – Our town, our youth, our schools, our parks, our streets. And the one thing that makes a small town frustrating – gossip and everyone knowing what everyone is doing – has, in the two decades I have been away, morphed into a pattern of hearing about someone’s hardship and helping them. Fundraisers for a sick teenager, a meal train for a family whose father tragically died, hands and tools to repair homes after floods. This is not boastful, self-important charity, rather it is a moral imperative to enrich the lives of our neighbors. To stand together and support one another when times are tough. Sure, there’s probably still gossip and infighting, but there is so much more community-minded thinking than I have seen anywhere outside the city limits. In the city, there was me. In the small town, it is we.
Traffic and dust and smog were replaced with clean air, birds singing, and nature all around. At night I could look up and see the milky way in all it’s glory arching across the sky, and I could feel again so small and insignificant in this wonder of fragile and brief existence. To stand on a windswept hill with nothing but grass and brush and sky, to know that my smallness made me great because I was there to witness it, to breathe it in, to crunch it under my feet, run my hands across its bark, let it blow through my hair and sing with the frogs after a storm. This place is peace, quiet. The stress of traffic and sirens and crowds and lights is gone, replaced by quiet, calm, a return to the pastoral way of life that has kept humans close to nature, interdependent and respectful of our place in the chain.
Any number of neighbors willingly share excess produce from their gardens. I can buy fresh-from-the-coop eggs from a woman down the street. In town, a family-owned ranch has a farm store where they sell beef that lived range fed on grasses from mesas, canyons, and rolling hills of the area. The animals were born, lived, and died on the same land I call home. Our home. Not factory farmed in another country, slaughtered under extreme duress and then frozen and shipped thousands of miles. No. Lived and died in the same place I call home, having roamed the same wide open high plateau I have come too appreciate as uniquely, desolately beautiful. The livestock became my neighbors, too.
When my son goes to school, the face greeting him in the office is one of my childhood friends, someone I have literally known all my life. His community knows him because they know me. And he regularly laughs when I point out children in the school pick up line by saying things like, “I know who that one is, she looks just like her mom.” Just like adults did to me all through my childhood. His behavior went from aggressive, defiant, acting out to appreciative, thoughtful, and cooperative. He could ride his bike two miles away to his friend’s house and the most traffic he would have to deal with are people who know who he is, a rogue cow that escaped a pasture, or a slow-moving tractor hauling bales of hay to said pasture.
Everyone waves. Everyone asks how you’re doing and pauses to hear the answer.
This is small town life.
To be greeted with a hug, not a handshake.
To breathe clean air and eat clean, locally grown food.
To have my siblings close enough to meet for dinner as often as we want.
To watch my nieces and nephews grow into adults and be there for every concert, game, or performance.
To see the stars at night and never to be rushed.
After the shock of the permanence of the move wore off, the fear that I made a mistake coming back subsided, and I realized this is what we needed. My son and I. After so many years of fighting to survive, to come home and just be. Just breathe. To be held and supported by a community. To be surrounded by nature and reconnect with the earth. To be out of the desert and back where all four seasons parade through every year. Where the horizon stretches as far as you can see. Where the wind may howl but the nights are calm.
I prayed for peace, and I think the universe brought me where I could find it. I’m exactly where I need to be.
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