No place like home

Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.  ~John Ed Pearce

Growing up in a somewhat small bedroom community surrounded by farmland, lots of my weekends as a little girl were spent visiting my parent's friend's horse ranch. I fed, groomed & rode horses from the age of about 7-15. I helped clean out the barn & shovel poop. Their house was surrounded by rolling hills and there was an undeniably beautiful silence out there.

When my mom was a little girl, she spent Summers out in the fields picking tomatoes. You could walk from one end of town to the other in under an hour and never feel the need to glance quickly behind you in fear of an unknown follower.
And though it's had a lot of urban sprawl over the last 20 years, my hometown is the kind where most everybody really does know your name, and if they don't know yours, they certainly know your folks, or your grandparents. It's a place where people settle in to raise their children and stay for generations.

I loved it there when I was little, but then I hit that age when all small town girls decide their dreams are just too big to be fenced in.
I moved to a far-away city at the age of 17, and have kept on moving ever since.
In the last few years, though, I seem to slowly be making my way back home again.
At the age of 32, with a husband, 4 kids, a cat, and a dog, I think I am finally ready to set down roots.
And isn't it ironic that the place I ran from 15 years ago is exactly the place I find myself heading towards?