Finding the simple life

From my view on Main Street, our small 12,000-resident community teems with activity, even at 6:30 a.m. Life should be simpler in this rural enclave. It rarely is.

Dump trucks thunder down our street, rattling the quiet and cracking the streets. Our sidewalks tend to flood during a heavy rain, and there's a bridge further down the street that has caved in. You may cross one tentative, temporary lane at your own risk, or detour.

We're full of detours. We detour around the streets that spider away from Main Street into murky arteries sometimes clogged with furtive drug deals. We detour around the thousands of folks now unemployed since our main industry closed its doors and left a cavernous concrete parking lot to sprout weeds. The hungry are hidden from us, though our local food pantry thrives.

Once a year, we collect money, food, and gifts for hundreds of Adopt-a-Family candidates, but we tend to forget them in the Christmas hangover of bills and work realities. It's too easy to be caught up in our own realities.

Life is not simple here. We just tend to simplify it to give ourselves the comforting possibility that we, after all, are all right.