The Saturday Morning Post: Hometowns

My mother graduated from High School in 1945 in Ashley Michigan. She talked to her parents about going onto school to train as a school teacher, and her father said, "why waste the time and money, you are just going to marry, have kids and quit working in a couple of years." She was unhappy with that answer. She wrote to an aunt who lived 150 miles away in the Detroit area, who responded, come live with us, there are lots of opportunities for young women here. She bought a train ticket to Detroit and packed her bags.  Her father refused to drive her to the train station in Ashley, one of her uncles who lived on the next farm drove her to the station. 

She worked, taking just a decade or so off when she had young children at home, and returning to work when I was about 10. She never went onto school, and never wanted to return to Ashley. I don't recall ever going there as a child. So on last September's road trip, we went for a visit. 

To get there you drive for about an hour from the nearest city of any size. Ashley is about a dozen blocks square, in the middle of thousands of acres of bean and corn fields. Ashley is a shadow of what it once was, or might have been.  A handful of businesses still operate on the main street, the only one that looked prosperous was the liquor store. The pharmacy with a soda fountain she worked at as a teenager is long gone. The train tracks are still there, but the station has been torn down. Passenger rail service ended in the 1950's.  The town is kind of nowhere, but it is still home.  

I can understand her reluctance to return.  Her history with wanting to chart her own course and stay was denied. Her leaving not under the best of terms with her parents. A lot of stressful memories. Maybe wondering, if she had stayed, if she had become a teacher, would the her future and the future of her home town have been different? 

There are thousands of small towns like this spread across the United States.  They were once prosperous farm towns. Today farming employs a fraction of the people per acre that it once did, and people moved to cities, leaving the farm towns to decay. Many of them are the towns that time forgot, with weeds growing through seldom traveled streets. A few years ago I went to visit the cemetery my mother's parents are buried on the fringe of North Star Michigan, the bar in North Star had gone out of business, that is how dead the town was, the bar went closed forever.  

I am glad we went. It helped me to understand my mother. She was a complicated person, who held many feelings and secrets inside.  I have no need or desire to return.