Small Town Living In A Big E-World

        I've lived my entire life in a small town.  The same small town. In the same house in the same small town.   I love to travel and if I had the means I would try to see every amazing thing this world has to offer.  Which is kind of funny because I'm also perfectly happy to be at home.  If I did not have to go up town to get the mail, I could be like my cat and never leave the yard.  The trip up town takes approximately six minutes on foot or 30 seconds in a car, so I don't have to be gone too long.  Also, if you go another 30 seconds past up town, you're out of town.

     I've lived through lots of changes in this small town.  No, I didn't ride a horse to school or have to walk on top of the fence posts when the snow was deep, my folks did that, but I can still remember my dad calling me in from the other room to change the channel on the TV.  For those of you who don't remember, remote controls used to be human.  The town has gone through a few changes too. Some for the better, some for the worse but we did feel a connection to the bigger outside world when the entire population, all five hundred or so households,  received matching trash bins. Now the garbage truck driver has to only hook the bin to the truck and the truck empties the bin.  Such technology!

     With the age of technology came the internet and everything E. E-mail, e-shopping, e-traveling and e-friends.  It's a wonderful thing because it allows me to connect with the outside world.  It lets me go places I haven't been, meet people I never knew and still feel the comfort this small town provides. 

     A couple of months ago I decided to sell a lawn mower on a popular e-auction site.  It was a huge self propelled push model and it was more than I could handle.  When I listed it, I made sure that it was for 'local pick-up only'.  No way was I going to ship this behemoth.  That all changed when I met J.R.  

     J.R. lives in California, a place that is on my bucket list and J.R. wanted this mower.  The first time we talked on the phone the conversation lasted almost an hour, with about seven minutes of that actually about the mower.  We talked about everything from politics to civil war history.  He assured me that the big California cities are not like they are portrayed in the movies and I assured him that I really could throw a rock and not hit my neighbors' house because of the distance between them.  He's a collector of old things and old cars and when I see one I think he might like, I send him an e-picture.  He in turn, being a history buff, sent me the picture at the top of this page.  It's a picture of the 'up town' in my small town, what it looked like a long time ago.  We get to share and connect through the e-world, discover new places and make new friends and yes, buy a used mower half way across the country.

     Yes, it's a small town and you are more likely to see a raccoon or possum hit on the street than the neighbors' cat.  You sometimes have to come up with your own form of entertainment like taking the trash out in the dark, flipping the lid over on the new fancy trash bin (it makes a really loud 'pop' when you do that) and listening to your neighbors scream "What the hell, was that a gun?!?"   But the big e-world is just a click away.