grace aloud

 Encyclopedia Entry: H is for Hometown

My hometown, Mount Pleasant, is in northeast Texas.  I was actually born in Nacogdoches, but since we left there when I was nine, most of my memories of growing up—jr. high, high school, etc.—are from Mount Pleasant.  It’s where my closest church family is, it’s where I went to high school, it’s where I learned to drive, and, until a few months ago, it was where my parents lived.

Mt. Pleasant (or MP as we sometimes call it) is a Main Street town.  That means there is a cute little mainstreet running through the middle of town, with shops and cute cafes and the best tortilla soup I’ve ever had in my life.  (I seriously dream about this soup.  And the buttery cheesy croutons.  Drool…)

The town has a little less than 14,000 people (last I checked) and it is the trailer capital of the world!  (Or that’s what they tell you anyway!).  There truly isn’t a ton there—we lived in town, but there is a lot of farm land and many people I went to school with had a farm.  There was a great ag program at the school… Did I mention I took welding senior year?  That may be a story for another time…

Also, there is a lovely scent that wafts through town when the chicken processing plant is running and the breeze flows the right direction through town… (super yuck.)

All through high school, I couldn’t wait to leave MP and go somewhere bigger or better.  I was excited to move on and up… And I went to Shawnee, OK.  Which wasn’t a whole lot different!  However, after I left home, I found that I missed it.  I am so jealous of my friends who can have lunch with their moms or drop by to say hi to their dads.  I even considered moving back (I considered… Jon wasn’t really excited about the idea) to open a private practice there one day to be close to my parents.  Now that they’re gone, I don’t really miss MP as much, although I do miss my friends from there and I will always have a super-special place in my heart for my church family there—those who watched me grow up and encouraged and supported me through everything.

Since my parents are gone, I”m not sure when I’ll go back to MP.  Maybe if someone gets married, or for my high school reunion.  Or I may just have to make a trip back for some of that Laura’s Cheesecake tortilla soup…. Mmmmmmmmmmm…

(p.s. the picture above is one I found online, and it’s of a mural painted in downtown on the side of a building… incidentally, that’s the building that houses my soup!!  You can also see the courthouse in the background—it was once voted the ugliest courthouse in the state? country? not sure, but they have done a lot of renovations to it since then.)