As someone born in Germany, who lived a peripatetic military brat and adult life, living in cities like Paris, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Denver, San Antonio; smaller cities like Columbia Mo, Lawton, Oklahoma, Barstow, CA - I chose, at what statistically will be the last third of my life, to consciously live rural, raising Angora goats on an 80 acre farm in unincorporated land in eastern Kansas.
There's a story there, too, though I suspect it will be hard with current lenses to see it as other than "white flight" even though it's really seeking a slower pace and quiet. Flight from urban and suburban in general.
I can't see another house from my house - the closest being a mile away on a gravel road across a wooded valley.
But I live in an area otherwise as you describe for yourself - our kids graduate high school and go away, and very few come back. I certainly did that (though I graduated from high school in Columbia, MO) - I went away, and young John never would have imagined Auld John would end up a farmer.
As someone born in Germany, who lived a peripatetic military brat and adult life, living in cities like Paris, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Denver, San Antonio; smaller cities like Columbia Mo, Lawton, Oklahoma, Barstow, CA - I chose, at what statistically will be the last third of my life, to consciously live rural, raising Angora goats on an 80 acre farm in unincorporated land in eastern Kansas.
There's a story there, too, though I suspect it will be hard with current lenses to see it as other than "white flight" even though it's really seeking a slower pace and quiet. Flight from urban and suburban in general.
I can't see another house from my house - the closest being a mile away on a gravel road across a wooded valley.
But I live in an area otherwise as you describe for yourself - our kids graduate high school and go away, and very few come back. I certainly did that (though I graduated from high school in Columbia, MO) - I went away, and young John never would have imagined Auld John would end up a farmer.