Oh Little Town

The funny thing about moving around when you are a kid is that people sort of lose track of where you are from and where you go.  I know this is hard to believe for my nieces generation when everyone has a cell phone and facebook, but there really was a time when someone moved that was the last you would see or hear of them forever.  For me there was Riverview, Apollo Beach, Boyette Springs, Boyertown, Topton and Little Rock all before heading to college.
My Florida friends thought that I disappeared, my Pennsylvania friends didn't know where I came from and Little Rock, well they hardly knew the girl who showed up for a year and then ran off to another state for college.
My point in all of this is the time I spent in Topton, PA spanning 7th - half of 11th grade.  With a few thousand people and I mean less than 2,000 and one building that housed the middle school and high school I could not get out of town fast enough.  Plain and simple Topton was not the place that I was meant to be.  The town was so small and everyone knew one another that I would literally be grounded for something that I had done before I got home from that said activity.
With all of that being said I stayed away from Topton for a long time, but Grant and I decided that when we had children we would make our way back to friends and family.  We have spent the last few years living our promise and traveling back to PA time and again.  Grant says that Topton is like a little Norman Rockwell painting and I can't argue about the views.
We try to go north in the Fall when possible because the truth is there is no place like the north when the Fall foliage is nothing short of spectacular when timed right of course, activities involving pumpkins can be found on every corner and everyone just seems happy to be sipping their hot cider.
Don't worry, I'm not packing my boxes to move north anytime soon as this Floridian doesn't want to live anywhere that there isn't a palm tree within sight or the beach being more than an hour away, but I did want to share the beauty that I didn't realize I was living amongst for my teenage years.