Thanks for posting that story Kylie. My town (Chicago suburb) used to be on the edge of nowhere. Kinda the like the divider between suburbs and farmland. There's a major N/S road just to the west of my house that stretches for about an hour's drive, and it used to be surrounded by beautiful cornfields the whole way, no longer than about 10 or 15 years ago. Now it's all (ALL) stripmalls and housing developments. You can drive on one road and see about 3 or 4 Applebees, Best Buy's, Old Navy's, Starbucks(probably even more of those)... To top it off, the business is heightening the value of the surrounding land, so every single farm from there to about a half an hour west is either for sale or already starting to be built up with new subdivisions. It's the kind of thing where you just don't understand/predict what will happen till it's already sold and built and there... and by that time it's too late and is already starting to spawn something else. I don't know what to do, and it's horrifying to see it continue so fast.
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and it's interesting how most americans have such distance from the farm. i am going to dig out a douglas coupland book called Souvenir of Canada from under a couple layers of stuff in a box i packed yesterday and type you a passage. it's a book about canada and there are all these headings arranged in alphabetical order. i love it, it's exactly right. ok, hang on.
ok, here it is. it's the entry entitled Small Towns. i'm going to reproduce it for you in its e ntirety, so this comment will get a bit long.
A lot of Canadian literature deals with small town or rural life and/or the immigrant experience. Metropolitan novels with characters who don't discuss the family barn or their country of origin are nearly n on-existent. CBC national radio also feeds this trend, with a hefty number of programs ending with a moral along the lines of I think we all know there's a small town in each of usThe reason for this is simple: outside of a handful of largish ci ties, Canada is a nation of small
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Thank you for showing that to me! I think the US still has some of that too, but it's more like Appalachia and the Deep South than the Midwest. Still though, it was weird for me in the first few weeks of college to go days without seeing a familiar face and not knowing every classmate's name and parents and life story. I take for granted that most people didn't grow up that way.
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and it's interesting how most americans have such distance from the farm. i am going to dig out a douglas coupland book called Souvenir of Canada from under a couple layers of stuff in a box i packed yesterday and type you a passage. it's a book about canada and there are all these headings arranged in alphabetical order. i love it, it's exactly right. ok, hang on.
ok, here it is. it's the entry entitled Small Towns. i'm going to reproduce it for you in its e ntirety, so this comment will get a bit long.
A lot of Canadian literature deals with small town or rural life and/or the immigrant experience. Metropolitan novels with characters who don't discuss the family barn or their country of origin are nearly n on-existent. CBC national radio also feeds this trend, with a hefty number of programs ending with a moral along the lines of I think we all know there's a small town in each of usThe reason for this is simple: outside of a handful of largish ci ties, Canada is a nation of small ( ... )
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