Where I wish I lived.

Sixty degrees and sunny. The perfect day to pick up a few odds and ends at the local mom-and-pop grocer for breakfast. Perfect for a stop in the local nobody ever heard of these guys coffee shop for a cup of slightly too weak but decent brew. Perfect day for walking amongst the fallen leaves past the tree planted in my grandmother's memory, down past houses I knew by the owner's names, once upon a time thirty years ago.

I always wanted to live here. When I was little all my friends lived in town, and I lived too far out to walk over and play. Now that I'm grown, I still crave walkable towns where the coffee shop owner knows me by name and the houses are all tiny and there are sidewalks everywhere, but its perfectly safe to just walk in the street too.

My mother-in-law lives across the street from my grandmother's old house; my children visit grandma on the same street I did. The "old man" who I remember from my childhood is still there, but he doesn't seem to have aged. He's still an eccentric old man, though my kids won't remember him as I did. Last time I was here, I talked to a nameless neighbor on the corner. I don't know him, but I remember that he gave the best candy on the street on Hallowe'en. I remember the little shop where grandma had her hair blued. And the houses where here blue-haired friends lived, now long gone. An old man stood behind me in the grocery store; when I lived near here, he must have been somewhat young. The old ladies in the store were not old then, they were my friends' parents.

It is strange how this town seems to have stepped outside of time. The houses, trees, streets don't age. The grocery looks the same. The drugstore has changed hands and is a coffee shop, but it still looks like the drugstore. But the people age and change, one generation steps up and takes the place of the one before. My grandparents are gone, but their friends faces are echoed in the next generation of townspeople. Ageless.

My mother-in-law blogs about this town. I'm glad she lives here. It is the closest thing I have to a hometown. I think I'd still like to live here. But part of its charm is that at the end of the week, I'll leave... back to another world, where time marches at a more typical pace.