A Little Country Living for the City Baby

About once a month my mom and I have been taking Grayson to Oklahoma for a day trip to visit my dad and her mom (my grandmother). The two of them live in a tiny little town in southern Oklahoma where both of my parents grew up, and where I actually lived for the first two years of my life.

I've been taking trips to visit there as long as I can remember, because after we moved we would go back to visit my grandparents several times a year. But now that I'm older and living in a large city in Texas, going back is almost like visiting a different land. Everything is so slow paced. There's no traffic. No stoplights, even. Just a blinking four way stop. Very rarely do you see people out on the street. There are a couple of restaurants, a grocery store, and a few convenience stores. It the perfect depiction of small town USA.

Since I grew up in a town that was very similar, this isn't out of the ordinary for me. The longer I'm away, the stranger it seems, but it's almost like getting back to "my roots" when I'm there. I know that I no longer belong, honestly you couldn't pay me to live so far from good restaurants, a Target, an IKEA, etc. But it's not totally foreign to me. It is to Arsen. He's always lived in a large city, and he is baffled by the fact that people choose to live that way. The farther removed I become, the more I feel the same.

But it is SO important to me that Grayson be exposed to this "country" way of life. I think a big part of who I am comes from growing up in a small town. I don't want him to be such a city boy that he's afraid to get his hands dirty. So last time we were visiting (and Arsen wasn't there to protest) I let my dad introduce Grayson to one of his horses. He wasn't scared at all...to be honest, he had no reaction whatsoever. Hopefully he'll see his trips to the country to see Papaw and ride horses and play outside in  a field as a vacation and enjoy every minute of it as he grows up.