Lenten Photo Challenge: Day 13 - Near

I love that most of my family is near by. Some are no more than 15 miles away from me, but excluding those that live in another state, I can travel little more than an hour in any direction and be at the homes of most of my family. But this is not about how near my family is to me.

It is about how near I am to the little town I grew up in. How near and dear it is to me.

I grew up in a little town called "Claytonville". And when I say small, I mean it.

small.

Like if you blink driving through it, you will miss it. Like total population of 50 small. When I was a kid living there, the population was maybe 70 at the most, and a good portion of those inhabitants were dogs.

What is in a town of 50-70 people? You would think not much but to me and my friends, it had everything. Sure it did not have a grocery store... although it did at one time. It did not have a gas station, unless you called the hand pumped tank that the grain elevator used a gas station. It had a garage, a post office, a church and a grain elevator when I was a kid. In it's past, it had a bank, a furniture store, apparently a train depot, grocery store, and a restaurant of sorts.

But then a fire burned a big portion of it to the ground and the little town of Claytonville never recovered. Who knows what it would be like if it has not burned. Maybe it and the neighboring town of Cissna Park would have grown together to make a sort of twin sisters town. But that never happened. As it is, the town has deteriorated quite a bit since I lived there. I suppose that happens to small towns where there is not much to offer. But there are good people there and it is a good little town.

What it did have was all kinds of opportunities for a bunch of imaginative and wild boys to run free and crazy and be boys and generally have a great childhood. If you look back into this blog I have written some entries about some of those adventures so I won't go into them in this posting.
Here's one
And another
or even this one

But that town gave me the best childhood I could hope for. And it still gives me memories and experiences. With family gatherings, visits with my mom, and I still have a couple of friends who live there, I am still connected to this little town. It is near and dear to my heart.

At some point in the future, I will not really have much connection with the little town of Claytonville. And this bothers me. I have deep affection for the town that gave me such a great childhood. Somehow I want to keep it near to me.

But until I figure that out, I will have to just go visit it.