Citrus?!
August 31st, 2007 - 7:47 am
My hometown is doomed to become an ever-increasing pit of tourist crappiness. I just found out the county I grew up in was named one of top ten best rural counties in the USA. In fact, it came in at number four. Great. Now everyone will want to live there, not just come visit on the weekends to eat German food and drink beer and buy over-priced trinkets.
I do have one issue to take up with the article by The Progressive Farmer.
…this county is more well-known for citrus than cattle.
I am not going to attempt to deny that cattle have never been the focus of Gillespie County, though they do play a large part in the life there, but since when have peaches been considered a citrus fruit? They aren’t, and I would think a magazine called The Progressive Farmer would know that.
Don’t mind me. I’m just a little bitter. It seems that as the years have rolled by, my heart has changed about ever living in a small rural Texas town again. I would love to go back, but unfortunately, the place I want to go back to isn’t there anymore. It’s little more than a roadside attraction, and it gets worse and worse every year. I have never found another place like the place I grew up in, and I doubt I ever will.
I could go on (and on and on) about my dissatisfaction with the ways in which my “homeland” has, in my opinion, devolved over the decades since I grew up there, but then I would start sounding like a crotchety old woman. I’m going to be grumpy in some other room of the house now. 
Oh, and if you have a minute, the photo gallery at the link above is worth a look if you want to see my roots. Aside from the few images of rich city-folk that have moved there to live their “rural dreams”, there are a few great shots of life in Gillespie County and some awesome landscape images that really capture the look of the place.
2 Responses to “Citrus?!”
Orb,
“I have never found another place like the place I grew up in, and I doubt I ever will.”
Traveling back home to the place where one was raised, we anticipate reliving those fond childhood memories: seeing, smelling, feeling the things that once were there. Sometimes this experience is less than favorable, as time and change can drastically distort what are memories hold dear. One of the best ways to retain those old memories are through old pictures. You should, if you are not already because you would be really good at it, become curator of the family photo album.
Well, it’s true, you never can really go back. Things change. I wouldn’t have minded had my hometown just grown, gotten larger, entered the 21st century on a normal growth track, but it is, really, becoming an absolute tourist trap of the worst kind. The entire economy is built upon parting tourists with their dollars for expensive trinkets and the idea they are visiting an actual small German town. Should it ever fall out of favor as a tourist destination, that place will be in a world of hurt.
I’ve had Mom going through the old photos and labeling the ones she can and weeding out the ones that she can’t or that we have no idea who or what they are. It’s a big task. My family has been film crazy since film was invented, and none of them were organized about the photos. Boxes and boxes of the things. Eventually, I’ll take the ones deemed “relevant and important”, get down to weeding through my own large stash of life event photos, and make some albums. And as soon as I find a place that converts old movie films into DVDs, that needs to be done. We have a bunch of them too, and there are some rare and special gems in that mess as well.