Who Lives Here ?

Who Lives Here: a few of the towns / areas I’ve been so far this year identified by descriptions of the people who live in them. 

Who lives here ? The people who like perfect streets and tidy ugly appartement complexes. The ones who thrive with a little bit of everything handy in an orderly fashion. Traditionalists who are learning to push boundaries, who believe that anything can be accomplished if you work hard enough. The ones who like a nice paved parking lot to set their eclectic second hand stores on, especially if it’s near a Tim Hortons. The ones who use their land to their advantage, to build bigger things with more  cement, to buy and sell on a whim, to make themselves better people. 

Who lives here ? The ones who want adventure, and novelty and beauty. They’re the ones who seek prestige and then self medicate with cocktails of mind altering drugs when they don’t find it. The ones who live their lives among a grandeur that sparks leaps of imagination. The ones who are willing to contend with weird weather patterns to live in the country of their dreams. The ones who identify with the land surrounding them, who delight in being swallowed by its hugeness and are slaves to its drama. 

And how about here -who lives here ? The hard working ones, who aren’t afraid of dust and dirt and long long days. The ones who crave aloneness and space. The ones who appreciate a ubiquitous form of beauty broken by the most spectacular skies. The peoples who would die of hunger without their daily dose of small town gossip. The only ones who are strong enough to deal with the wiles of the most drastic weather patterns -hails, droughts, winds, blizzards and, in between these all, one or two scorching weeks of summer. The people who identify with the land they live on, who live from it and grow from it and are at its fickle mercy.