Grain towers + growing up

I grew up in rural Western Canada, and throughout my life grain elevators have been a visual staple of the world I lived in. Back in the glory days, almost every single town had one - it was where the trains came every fall for the floods of grain, the symbol of a thriving economy.

Most of the grain towers around here fell into disrepair a long time ago. There isn't any purpose for them anymore - very little of what grows here grows on small family farms, and even less of it stays here after it's grown.

When I was a kid, the grain elevators seemed as immortal as anything else. In a small town, things rarely change - it makes it easy to forget that they still can, whether or not you want them to. When I was a kid, the one in my small town was the landmark I watched the out car window on long drives home, holding up my hand to see how little it looked compared to my hand all alone on the vast, empty prairie. When I got a little older, it was the place that I walked by when I wanted to be alone - just me standing alone on the dirt roads, the grain tower's shadow behind me and the blazing sunset ahead. The summer before eleventh grade, I went inside for the first time with a friend - to her, it wasn't a landmark, just a place to get drunk and fuck away from prying eyes. I stopped being friends with her a couple months later, but the sense of adventure stayed with me.

They tore it down this week - they started exactly two months before the day I'll graduate from my tiny high school, and in less than 5 days it's gone from its former majesty to nothing more than a pile of ashes at the landfill on the side of the highway. It was a freak April snowstorm the day I found out, but I still trekked out to the edge of town to watch it happen. It was more unceremonious than I thought it would be. I guess we always expect things that have always been there to either stay that way or go out with a bang. The vast majority do neither.

Sometimes, it's so frustrating staying here that I can't wait to get out and move away. Then, I feel guilty that I'm spending the last of my time here waiting to get out instead of savouring it. Everyone tells me I'm going to love university, but I've never been anywhere but here doing anything but this.

I don't really have a point to any of this, other than that sometimes it scares me that time keeps going and you can't go back. That, and that the prairie skyline will always have a place in my heart. And on my page, as soon as I figure out how to draw it and also code it because I currently know how to do either.