Chicago

There are people who love Chicago. People who love big cities in general. The hustle and bustle. The culture and activities. Places to go, people to meet, things to see. My friend Mike refers to the area where we live as BFE. For the purposes of this blog I prefer a term from my youth. Galesburg lays on the eastern edge of an area referred to in the early 1970's as Forgotonia. Bypassed by modern transportation highways and industry it was a lost and ignored area of west central Illinois. There are more and better highways now but the industries that dotted the landscape have fled to places where the labor is cheaper.

Back to Chicago. I am going there tomorrow with Carol to help our niece Kate move from there to Peoria. I hate Chicago. Not really the city, I hate urban areas. Not some of them, all of them. We went on vacation last year and the route took us through Nashville, TN and Atlanta, GA. Hated driving through both. HATED! Going to Chicago with a full size pickup truck and a large U-Haul trailer. No fun.

We live on a dead end road. No one lives past us on the road. The neighbor checks his cows in the pasture across the road twice a day. The mail gets delivered about noon. On a good day that is the traffic for the day. Three vehicles. Tomorrow they will be three or four wide as far as the eye can see. No thank you, very much!

Sunday, we will return to our little corner of Forgotonia. The turkeys will be gobbling at dawn. The birds will sing, the cows will moo. At the end of the day the sun will set and the coyotes will howl and yip while the owls hoot in the trees. Not the music of the bustling city. They are the sounds that sooth my soul. The sounds of home.