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This reminds me of what Kurt Vonnegut said about home: "Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again."

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Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 25, 2023Liked by Tara

Too add to the transformation of home, the elementary school you attended was surrounded by undeveloped land and anyone could easily walk through it's campus (this sounds like one of those stories you tell your kids that is unbelievable). Now, there's a 30 foot tall chain link fence that surrounds the campus keeping potential intruders at bay. I don't know about you, but I could not wait to leave what I once described an isolated desert hell-scape where nothing ever happened and there was nothing to do and vowed that I was never going to come back. Only to realize, much later, that I lived in one of the most beautiful places in the world and started feeling a sense of loss when visiting.

Home is a neighborhood filled with children riding bikes and a gaggle of blonde hair children bouncing a ball in their driveway. Bend feels even less like home now that the neighborhood of kings, once filled with middle class families, has more than a few houses that are worth a million dollars.

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