Trite, I know, but it’s a cliche for a reason.

On Friday, we had a girls’ night out that started in my hometown. I left there twenty years ago, and since my folks moved a year later, I’ve hardly been back to see the changes.

Driving in to town was a little startling, but since that’s the part you can see from the freeway, I’ve spotted that before. That wasn’t the side of town that I grew up on anyway, so it was a lot like some other town.

I cooled my heels at my best friend’s folks’ house for a little while, as I didn’t have time to go check in to the hotel and get back before our dinner reservations. They’re not any different at all, still with the friendly bickering and the house looks about as it did. I bet they weren’t expecting me to still crash in on them in my forties though! (Which I’m not quite, but I don’t guarantee that I won’t do it again in two years.)

Then the girls were stuck in traffic, so I went downtown to find the place and secure our reservation. My head started swivelling like a tourist’s. The whole main street seems to have been remodelled in modern yuppie, except for some holdouts like the 50s-styled donut shop and the western store. Fancy restaurants and clubs everywhere, and people all over the place. I live in a town now where people really only walk because they’re poor, but these seemed to be cruising the downtown on foot. Back in my day, we used to cruise it in our cars, until they banned that. Back in my father’s day too.

I sat at the bar of the fondue place and people-watched. Besides that I don’t really like cities, and I’m sure it’s quite nice as cities go, I don’t believe you would catch me living there again, ever. I’m just not the yuppie type, and you clearly had to be to live there.

Fondue was fun and interesting, and surprisingly filling, and then we went back to the hotel. We ended up flaking on the rest of our plans, but that’s OK. We were out of the house. I’d planned to get up early so I could still get to the mountains, and not drinking helped with that goal a lot. I woke up at 5:30, laid there waiting for anyone else to get up and join me for breakfast for an hour, and then got up and got ready when it became clear that they weren’t going to.

On the way home, I swung through my old neighborhood. We used to be on the edge of town, and just a couple block over, we could run loose in the creekbed and the sycamores and the abandoned vineyard nearby. But that’s all paved over with million-dollar houses now, and my old house is well back from the city limits.

Things have become smaller in that neighborhood. The long, long street that I remembered had shrunk, and the front yards that were so huge that we could roll down the lawns look like postage stamps. I’m sure they’re not, that I’ve grown, but I thought it was odd that my current front lawn is bigger than that one. That one had seemed to go on forever when I was five. I suspect the backyard has contracted too.

I had to look at house numbers to find mine. The landscaping that mom had planted when she ripped out the lawn when I was in high school is all mature, and obscures the face of the house. I would have liked to get a picture, but it was early in the morning, and I didn’t know if the residents would appreciate a papparazzi shot at that time of day. I ticked off the neighbor’s houses as I drove by, recognizing each one like an old friend. I drove on out of the subdivision, thought about swinging by the high school, and decided against it. Enough reminiscing; time to move on. I find that I don’t miss that town at all. I’m not a town person anymore; it’s grown to a city and I’ve grown the other direction, into a country girl.

I like it that way.