As Lil Bit's care needs have increased the need to have someone with her overnight has started. I've spent the night in my hometown off and on over the years when needed but never this much.
When I graduated high school I left the week after graduation for the summer in Georgia and then headed to college. I burned the bridge as I drove over it and never looked back. To say I wanted to get out of my hometown was a definite understatement.
The Hellmouth as I shall refer to it sits in a fertile river valley in Southwestern Oklahoma. It was founded before statehood in Indian Territory along the railway. Home to about 16,000 souls it's seen good times and really bad times with it's biggest employers coming and going with the two mainstays - the liberal arts college and the hospital where I grew up being the only long term ones. Besides those hard scrabble folks who live off the land either by farming or ranching, or by trying to coax crude from the ground.
Mother Nature loved to smack down by my hometown with droughts and floods and once actual locusts. And then the universe just loved to let wildcatters hit dry holes and then drive the price of oil into the ground.
It wasn't a bad place to grow up. Most small towns aren't. But for every part that is Norman Rockwell'ish there are two parts that are much more Twin Peaks. The good part of town was never very far from the bad part of town.
There was the auto dealer who paid for renovations on the baseball field that we found out years later was the largest drug dealer in the state - flying in planes full of cocaine and meth to the local airport that should have only seen flights for crop sprayers.
The widow who made the best lemon pies in a three county area who would stand on her porch and yell racial slurs at local Black kids to get away from her yard. The town was and is still very segregated. I can remember whispers about not being on the wrong side of Fourth Street after dark. The Hellmouth was a sundown town (read about it here if you don't know what that is) but inside the town vs. the city limits.
And on the corner is the church that I have many good memories in - where I was dedicated , attended vacation bible school (every year), sang in the choir, was baptized, and that Momma paid for to entirely renovate the whole building. Is also the congregation that said neither Lil Bit nor I was welcome in after I came out and the pastor now preaches about illegal aliens, Antifa, Jewish space lasers and all kinds of other fun stuff in order to keep the donations coming. (Note bene - simmer down if you think I have something against Christianity. Me and Jesus? We're just fine, talk daily and have a deal. My beef is with organized religion and the damage that it has and can do.)
There was always a tension in The Hellmouth right beneath the surface between those who listened to their higher angels and those who wouldn't know an angel even if St. Michael came down and knocked them in the head with the blunt end of his sword.
It wanted to be a great and welcoming little city on the plains but would always trip over it's own best intentions. And, yes, it was a dry county until well after I had left before liquor by the drink finally passed the God fearing folk in town would just be sure to drink their beer out of a plastic cup. It's a city that is ripe for a Music Man to come to town and sell it a 76 trombone parade.
What I have noticed lately as I've spent more time there is that there seems to be a blight that is spreading in The Hellmouth.
A sadness.
A feeling of being left behind.
Houses that look boarded up and have tarps as roofs that you think are abandoned are actually rent houses that someone is just days from being evicted from. Other houses have burned up in pursuit of making meth.
The sadness permeates large sections of the town and it's spreading.
The ruin seems to have set in and makes people give up. To understand why life expectancies are going down in many parts of the country look no further than The Hellmouth to understand what is going on.
Folks just stop. Stop caring. Stop living.
They give in to the rot. They give up.
When we think of urban rot most think of large cities and urban cores, but there are many, many more towns like my hometown that people often overlook.
These are the ones who have been left behind often with no prospects and no future. No investment and a longing for bygone days - what they forget is that it wasn't that great for all.
The Hellmouth needs a Buffy Summers to save it.
I don't know what it will take to fix it or if it can be. But what I can tell you is that it will take more than a fancy hat with a slogan.
It's going to take hope.
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