I’ve spent a lot of time on Facebook in the past few weeks. One of the fun things is reconnecting with high school classmates and friends. It’s interesting to see the direction that our lives have taken since graduation. Most of us are married, with children ranging from none to seven. Many appear to be happy with where they are, with the snowy exception here and there.
One of the most interesting things about it to me is that we are all still connected to our hometown in some way. Many of our parents or grandparents still live there, and some never left the area. The recent death of one of my friends grandparents made me think that we are all still connected by that single strand. Something will invariably draw each of us back home, whether it be a wedding, funeral, reunion, or holiday. We don’t all descend upon that little town on the Kansas prairie at the same time, but we all cross into the city at some point.
There are exceptions of course. A few don’t have any reason to go back. I’m sure that as the years go by, more will move from the connected group to the unconnected. Slowly, living connections to our hometown will disappear and the only thing remaining will be that we grew up there and that many of us graduated from high school together.
That web of connections grows and blends together with time. Each of us has new friends and maybe new places we live. Those new friends are added into our own web, connecting us to their past, and they to ours. Our children will develop their own connections to other people, as will our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and so on. Each person that my life touches will, knowingly or otherwise, have a connection to a small town in south central Kansas, a family farm, and a community of people willing to do anything for each other.
That’s pretty cool.
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