Small towns.

On any given weekend in this state, you can find a street festival going on in one of the country towns or even the bigger cities... some sort of outdoor celebration that brings most of the town into town to enjoy the day. This weekend, our own small town had its outdoor festival, complete with small carnival rides, food booths, arts & crafts vendors, farmer's market vegetables, a chili cook-off, a cake cook-off, and a contest for little kids to determine who was going to be Little Miss Ice Cream Queen, or some such title.

The local police had roped off the streets to moving traffic, so you had to park on the outskirts of the town and walk towards the "historic downtown center" of town. There was a vintage car show, so those cars were allowed to come in before the festival started.... all those great old cars lined up on Main Street was a sight to see.

Whenever we go into town here, the word Mayberry passes our lips more than once. No matter what's going on, whether it's a street festival or just a plain old Saturday afternoon, our little historic downtown squares are very Mayberry-esque. If you close your eyes to the late-model cars parked diagonally towards the curbs, you would swear you left the technology-inundated millennium-years behind and somehow got plopped down into the early 1950s.

Walk into a store here and someone calls out Hey there! before you can get both feet over the threshold. And if the store-owner has to run to the corner to pick up their lunch, they will do just that as they tell you to make yourself at home. If you don't buy anything, you're still told to Have a great day, y'all! or Have a blessed day! And if you do buy something, then your face is never forgotten and you've made a shop-friend for life. I remember you! Y'all bought those cute little embroidered towels with the baby chicks on them!

No one drives very fast through the streets of our downtown area. The locals know that there's really nothing to rush about for, and the visitors are confused by the one-way street signs at every corner. Makes for a peaceful walking/shopping experience in town. And the streets are so small and compact that you can park your car just once and walk to just about everything worth walking to within the downtown limits.

Such a difference from the larger part of town near the highway, where four corners are filled with shopping centers. WalMart, the drugstore chains, supermarkets, department store chains, the dollar stores, the gas stations. Everyone seems to be more in a rush there. Not a city-rush, but a country-rush. On any given day, the WalMart parking lot is filled with travel-trailers whose owners have parked and gone into WalMart to get groceries for their mobile kitchens. The stores at The Four Corners (as the locals sometimes call it) are bigger, busier, more crowded, more suburban rather than country. The 1950s flair disappears once you leave our pretty little historic downtown streets. That's not to say that the rest of the town doesn't have its own Hill Country flavor, it's just more in keeping with the year 2010.

2010. Two thousand ten. Every time I think of the decade we're in, I remember an arithmetic problem we were given in the fifth grade. We had to figure out how old we would be in the year 2000. I remember the class looking at the teacher (a nun, actually) as if she had lost her mind. The year 2000 was so far away from anything we could wrap our fifth-grade brains around. And now we're ten years past that. In a heart-beat. Everything flies by in a heart-beat. Especially the pages of a calendar.