My Nemesis.

I awake from the greatest ten minutes of sleep I’ve ever had. I roll to my side. I look at my alarm clock. 7:50. 7:50?! I hit snooze at seven and meant to sleep for ten minutes, things are clearly not going as planned this morning!


I race down stairs, grab my keys, and jump into the driver’s seat of my 2009 Toyota Corolla. I take off, speeding down my gravel road and turn out onto the highway which will take me to school. I am suddenly wide-awake and well-aware of the fact that I have less than fifteen minutes to drive the twenty minutes it will take me to arrive on campus.


After five-minutes of speeding pass, I have made good progress; this is when I see it. In the distance, maybe a mile in front of me, blocking out my view of the sun: the dreaded tractor. We have met before, quite often actually. At least once a week we have an encounter and my arrival to school suddenly becomes close to impossible.


You see, people in my town have a different idea of how they should get from point A to point B. While I have no problem driving my foreign, light-weight, car, the boys and girls of small-town, Missouri seem to think that these vehicles would not be sufficient modes of transportation for themselves.


Cars are the easiest way for me to explain it. When someone asks me where I’m from, I tell them, “I little town in Missouri,” but rarely do I feel they really understand what I mean by that. So I explain, “Parties in corn fields, tractors on the highways, and they pronounce wash as ‘WAR-sh.’” This is where I grew up, and where I didn’t fit in.


I found myself, as soon as I could drive, constantly making the hour long drive into the nearest city. I know, I know, “the grass is always greener on the other side,” and I don’t disagree with that. I have grown to realize that living in my hick-town made me love the hustle and bustle of the city that much more, and I don’t mind. I have the opportunity to travel and leave my small town, and I am going to take advantage of it.


I was the odd-ball who didn’t own a truck or consider my John-Deere a source of pride, but that’s okay because I know where I will fit in, I just have to make it there.