My present and future hometown is quaint. There's no other way to say it. It isn't surrounded by strip malls, although there is an outlet mall down the road and a Costco in the town on the other side of it. Its main street isn't much until night, when it comes alive. The neighborhoods are a mix of the old and the new. But what makes this town so special is its people.
I'm from a much faster-paced lifestyle where people, if they take the time to be nice, often forget to do so. Here, it's a rule of thumb that niceness is to be expected. Sure, you might find a diffident teen here or there, and perhaps there's an angry cuss of an adult mixed in for flavor, but people here are nice on a par with Ireland. Heck, even the auto repairman to whom I'm bringing my car couldn't be nicer.
The closest thing to which I can liken is is a fictional town, Grady. That was the setting for the movie Doc Hollywood, one of my favorite movies despite Michael J. Fox. Grady has the mix of the physical beauty with the niceness of its people with just the right amount of quirkiness thrown in for equal measure. Karen and I were in Florida and I would have liked to see the actual town in which the movie was filmed, Miconapy, Florida, but it wasn't to be. Here are some photos of Miconapy that I took off the internet:
If you take out the palm trees and imagine snow, you'd have my new hometown.
The pace of life here is nicer, slower, more amenable to...well, living. Sure, it's a change. The local TV ads crack me up. That St. Baldrick's Day is the lead story on the news when six teenagers died in a horrible crash elsewhere surprises me. There's almost no mention of national news. But that's OK. Sometimes, less is more.
Did I mention this is Karen's hometown? That also explains why I love it so.
(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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