Hometown: Location, Location, Relocation

Thing: A blog post that uses both facts and personal narration
Audience: E12 classes
Writer: me
Purpose: To create a piece of  descriptive writing about my hometown using both general, cultural, historical facts and my experiences or memories.
Context: I am studying self-reflection in E12 and we just read the Oxford Project. The Oxford Project is a photo-journal that documents a town in Iowa and its residents. I am reflecting about my own hometown and its impact on my life.

Requirements: 

• Description of your "hometown"
• One memory
• Will you return, stay or leave and why?
• Incorporate at least three general, historical, cultural facts about your hometown.
• Provide one image
• 200-300 words

Fact Check Sources:  Use at least three different sources to find general, historical, cultural facts about your hometown. Document your sources
Wikipedia
Census Viewer
Tampa FaceBook
BestPlaces.net

Trails:
In some places the sky scrapes the city landscape, in some places the sea greets the sunset, but some places are dust. That's where I'm from, where dust clouds the horizon in plumes and gritty billowed bursts. Dust and wheat and wind and land stretched out for miles interrupted only by train tracks, grain elevators, and steeples.
112 people, that seems like a lot of people, unless it's a town of people. A town of my people. Tampa. Tampa, where I stumbled my first steps, broke pieces of myself, fed cattle, combined wheat, cooked supper (not dinner), built forts, and ran and ran and ran. I grew up running, grasping for a distant golden brown-blurred blue-white horizon. But mostly, I remember the dust and the wind. Constant wind: snow wind blowing side-ways, skin-cracking summer sun-wind, dew-wicking warm spring-wind, damp-chilling bleak November-rain-wind. Wind as constant as the crops rotated fields, buildings crumbled, people moved away. I moved away. But winding through the wheat around the empty houses, the wind sustained.
It's a time warp. That's what the yearly visits are now, my sons rummage through the half-stocked shelved isles in the Tampa grocery store (the only one in a 40 mile radius) and we supper (that's lunch in Kansas dialect) with my grandma at the Sante Fe Trail Cafe, the only restaurant in town. Newly remodeled, the store's facade echoes the old, but better, and the tables slowly fill up around noon. The original outdoor brick was so fragile, it wore away like chalk. And the only remaining original brick that could be saved is now solidified and mortared inside the interior walls, preserved like a mural, patched like an eye-sore, displayed like a trophy collecting dust.
Dwindling since the 1930's (population 232), the departed are like me, occasional visitors. Leaving the permanent residents, empty nesters, with a median age of 53.5. We who left are escape artists drawn back by necessity, nostalgia, belonging, or maybe just the vastness, the space, the ever-extended uninterrupted sea of land. Whatever it is that pulls me, I am sure of one thing: I am tethered; I am anchored. I am drawn back if not so physically than mentally. Perhaps the years will send me down the yellow-brick-road to home, perhaps the time between will push me farther down the unexplored trails far-far away, for now, I would just settle for less time between transient visits.