Saturday, October 06, 2007

It Takes A Village...

All that typing yesterday of "7 Random Things About Me" has caused me to take a short trip down memory lane today...back to the tiny village I grew up in Nebraska. I recently stumbled across a website where a couple of "interesting" artists have moved from Las Vegas to my old home village and bought the High School/Grade School I attended for 12 years...and...they are LIVING in it!









My home village had a population of around 420 people when I was growing up...everyone knew everybody and practically everyone was related to someone somehow. The town my grandma lived in 7 miles away had a population of 80! And in that village, I really WAS related to almost 60% of the people living there. LOL Talk about "inbreeding"...
Growing up in a rural Nebraska village was not an easy life...particularly for someone like me who longed to LEAVE that life and explore the world. As I said, I attended 12 years of schooling in the same buildings with a senior graduating class of 17 students. Saying I was the valedictorian really doesn't hold much weight in a class size this small, but...I was.









I think the things I miss the most about my village are the open spaces...the farm lands...the seasons...the camaraderie of being soooo small, you had to get along with and participate in everything. I miss the fall air and the football/volleyball games...the Halloween pranks that, in this day and age, we would have been arrested for "terrorism". LOL


As you can tell by the current day photos posted here, little remains of my farming village...now only somewhere around 200 people live in the village and it grows smaller and smaller each year as corporate farming takes over the land for profits. But it IS still there...somewhere on the plains of Nebraska...reminding me of a simpler time without MS or the things that occupy my mind these days.
(I painted this fading mural in 1976 with the help of my mother and sister...it was for the bicentennial!)

4 comments:

Sara said...

That's so cool that your mural is still up! Wish I had something cool like that to look at when I go to the town I grew up in, but there ain't nuttin there but more new buildings & peeps!

Miss Chris said...

Where in Nebraska in your old town? My husband was born and raised in Lincoln. He's a Cornhusker through and through!

BRAINCHEESE said...

SARA:

It's really a bit creepy to grasp the idea these artists are living in my high school...as their HOME! I mean it was a small building, but not THAT small!

How's the moving/packing going?

LD

BRAINCHEESE said...

MISS CHRIS:

OMG!!!! Another Husker!!!! What high school did he go to? Tell him I attended Bryan Memorial Hospital School of Nursing...he'll get a kick outta that...it's in Lincoln. And I grew up listening to ALL of the NE Football games on radio and TV...Tom Osbourne, etc.

My village was about 100 miles SW of Lincoln right on the Nebraska/Kansas state line near Hebron...he might know that town, or Fairbury...village was too small to really be on the map.

Exciting!

LD