Growing up in Damascus kind of gives me this weird timeless nostalgic feel. I remember when I was little, I thought our boundary lines never ended. We were so small that the ‘blink and it'll be gone' saying had a lot of relative and literal meaning to us. We were cute little older neighborhoods where a lot of the houses had been built in the 70s and 80s and then didn't change a lot. There weren't subdivisions very often. All the houses still had character. We were a lot of fields mostly.
We were safe. our parents didn't watch our every move worried someone would snatch us. There were two old style wooden play structures in my neighbourhood. I started going on bike rides and strolls out in the park when I was 6 years old. Everyone just kind of knew each other.
In Damascus you can always see Mt.Hood. And at the old elementary school, when you lay in that piece of grass between the track and the baseball field farthest from the building, backed up by the Christmas tree lot, that mountain looks like it is looming. And when the sun sets in summer that spot is the most beautiful place in the whole town.
And all the stores are just familiar like there all the same stores for everyone, if you say "I went to bi mart" people know you mean THE bi mart. There's only one in town.
One of the amazing things is that we are actually disenfranchising, basically we don't want to be a city anymore. And that's so cool to me because when I grew up we weren't a city. We were technically still a village. And that's special to me, that your roots go back to your roots, because the village part was how it was when my parents were still together, and I was really young and things weren’t difficult yet.
Damascus feels like coming home when you do get back from college. It feels like a place so small that your name will be whispered and mentioned by teachers in the middle school hallways long after you've moved on to bigger things.
I loved growing up there. Sometimes you live in places and then move and so you have all these different senses and definitions of the word ‘home’. Damascus will always be home to me.
