A moment...

I know that my readers really prefer when I blog about the boys, and I'll try to do mostly that, but I'm taking a moment to talk about chickens. I hope you don't mind.

Yesterday morning, I drove Trevor and a classmate to Harner's Farm (see pics below of same farm) for a school field trip. While we were there, I mentioned to another mom that when I was a kid, we had chickens and that I was afraid of them.

She said, "oh, did you grow up on a farm?"

I've known for awhile that growing up in Wynona wasn't like growing up in Chicago or even Pawhuska, for that matter. It was tiny and rural and we had chickens despite living in the middle of town (and a horse and a goat and a cow and rabbits and even geese and ducks, I think, when I was little). I had 9 people in my graduating class and missed out on a scholarship when I was a junior in college because at #2 out of 9, I wasn't in the top 10% of my class. It was special and unique and different.

But, it was also a really long time ago! This is what the other mom's question made me realize. We may have been kinda unique even in Wynona with our mini-barnyard collection of animals. But, it wasn't unheard of to have a mini-barnyard, was it? I don't know anyone who has chickens now, except people in the Key West with their feral chickens, but that's a whole different thing. If I brought chickens to live in my backyard, I'd get a ticket and kicked out of the neighborhood and people would write letters to the city about me. It would be bad. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking Mom and Dad might even get letters written about them if they re-stocked the old chicken yard in Wynona.

I've thought that where I live now and where I lived when I was a kid were just two different places, two different *types* of places. I thought that in Wynona, you can have chickens and ride around in the bed of a pickup. In Chicagoland, forget about it. Even in our new location, I'm pretty sure a chicken yard would get me classified as the crazy chicken lady and even taking the kids in the car buckled up without a car seat would get me hanged. But now, I'm thinking that I'm just wrong.

It's not that there are two different *types* of places. I mean, Wynona is still special and unique in its tinyness and lack of high speed internet and a strong cell phone signal. My bigger issue here is that it's just two different times. And, my childhood was just a really long time ago, and things have just changed that much.

It's just weird that I grew up in such a vastly different time than now. How can that be?

And, when did things change so much?

I thought it was me because I keep moving all over the country. But, it's not my moving, it's my aging.

Freaky.