You Can Go Home Again

This weekend my wife, daughter and I went back to the town where I grew up. This weekend was our town's festival called Old Settler's Days - aptly named. The town slogan is "Home of the Proud Prairie People" and was coined in a contest by my paternal grandmother's brother.

My wife and I on Main St, Toulon, IL

We've made a new tradition every year by going back home to represent our family's float in the parade. Our float theme is "Sowin' Oats Since 1936." Dad started the tradition to honor his father and anybody that happens to be in town that weekend, is fair game to participate in the float. Personally, I think the concept is genius. We tow the original high-wheel wagon that my great-grandfather bought for the farm back in 1916. Dad even has the receipt for it. It is outfitted with an end-gate seeder and we pull it with a 1936 John Deere 'B'.

The part I love is the orchestration of tom-foolery that we stumbled upon by accident. The person sitting on the buckboard throws candy to the eager, adoring fans. (Nice you can still do that in a small town, try throwing candy from a float in an urban city and see what happens!) As they scramble to fill buckets and bags with the loot, the wagon passes by seeding oats along the parade route. You should see the stunned looks on the kids' faces as the oats come flinging out, pelting them like invisible missiles. Their flailing arms as they try to get out of the path like when you accidentally step on a bees' nest. Makes me LOL every time!

The part I also enjoy is seeing faces in the crowd of people I know. Everybody's so much older and so the features are more distorted. My recollection of names isn't so good. If I get a chance to actually visit with anybody, the interaction is one of genuine interest, friendship and awe. I haven't been home for 17 years and now as adults, it is so interesting to hear what people actually thought of you back then. I have always been pleasantly surprised by my colleagues impressions of me and honored to have been a part of their life as they have mine. We all had our cliques right? “You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But, what we found out is that each one of us is: a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal.”