If You Don't Get It, You're Not from a Small Town

Between the late 1800s and mid-1900s, both sides of my family tree took root in northeastern Colorado, in a one-stoplight town called Akron (yes, perpetually confused with its more famous namesake in Ohio). My parents met at Akron High School in the sixties. My dad’s parents owned the only clothing store in town, and my granddad served as the town mayor for years. My mom’s father ran the family business he married into, a grain elevator, while his wife taught music lessons. My parents married right out of high school and attempted to move away for a time, but family and farmland soon brought them back, allowing my brother and me six or seven years surrounded by grandparents, extended family, and small-town life. My dad was the high school football coach; my mom taught—you guessed it—piano lessons. Although we moved to Oklahoma by the time I started fifth grade, Akron was my home, too, just as it had been for my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and even one great-great grandparent who lived long enough to pose for a rare five-generation picture with my brother.

Our stint in Oklahoma was short lived, and I started eighth grade in another small town just 90 miles from Akron. I returned to Akron for long weekends, holidays, and large chunks of the summer. I went to football games there and attended their prom with a childhood friend. I cruised Main Street and drove 100-miles-an-hour down the single runway at the Akron airport late at night with a car full of Akron teenagers. Eight years later, the maid of honor in my wedding was the freckle-faced girl who came up to me the first day of kindergarten, at Akron Elementary, and asked if I wanted to be her best friend. (I took that commitment seriously!)

In the past twenty years, my trips to Akron have been limited mostly to funerals. I buried my dad and grandparents one by one, enduring the blazing heat, blowing snow, and tireless winds so common on the plains of Colorado. The cemetery sits on the west side of town, and a couple times a year, when the wind and the clouds are feeling cooperative, you can sort of make out the Rockies, a reminder that you’re actually still in Colorado.

I returned to that cemetery again last week, this time accompanied by a husband and four children of my own. The children said goodbye to their last great-grandparent, the only one any of them have ever known, the one who sent generous Christmas and birthday checks, signed simply, “Love, Great-Grandpa” in beautiful script. We learned that day that my grandpa—known only to me as a farmer, a golfer, and a lover of horse races—also loved poetry and opera. We learned that as a kid, the third-oldest of eleven children, he was instructed to sit out on the porch after dinner and wait for Jesus to return. When that didn’t happen, and when life threw its curveballs as life always does, my grandpa lost his way for a while. But death has a funny way of bringing us full circle, and my grandpa spent the last weeks of his life doing little besides waiting for Jesus. He’d wake up from a sound sleep and holler out, “When?! When am I gonna die already?” He was actually willing Jesus to come get him, and with his affairs in order and his goodbyes said, he got what he longed for. He died peacefully in his sleep last Wednesday at the age of 88.

Grandpa chose to be cremated, so there was no cemetery burial. Still, I wasn’t going to miss a chance to drive through the Akron Cemetery. After the service, my family trekked out there with my mom and my uncle and aunt from Los Angeles. There we experienced small-town life at its finest, chatting about the townsfolk, comparing burial plots, reminiscing, noting things like, “Wow! Aunt Kate’s been gone almost twenty years?” and remembering. I took pictures of my sweet little girls sitting on my dad’s headstone in their flowery Easter dresses. But mostly the kids ran wild, tumbling and hurdling over strangers’ graves, horrifying Kevin, who finds cemetery entertainment an anomaly. But this is Akron. This is what you do here. It’s what I grew up doing.

I love being from a small town.