Nothing to See Here

“and one day you come back/and everything you drive past/makes you wonder why you swore for all those years/that there was nothing to see here”

 

I think almost anyone from a small town will tell you that there is nothing there.

Nothing to do. Nothing to see. Just… nothing.

And for the longest time I felt the same way.

When people ask me where in Canada I’m from, I say “The flat middle part where there’s nothing”.

“A ‘city’ of 13,000. There’s not much there”

But, being away has this way of changing things.

Being away has this way of making everything look a little different.

Now I see the charm of driving down that main street and hitting every red light (but only when you’re in a hurry).

I appreciate how every time I walk into the grocery store where I got my first real job, I run into someone that I know.

I drive by my old high school and see my parking spot, and immediately go back to arriving at school for all of those early morning band practices.

I see the studio where I took dance classes every Thursday evening for so many years.

I notice how the lake is still filled with angry, aggressive geese and remember all of the times we got chased by them during gym class.

I enjoy the dusty gravel roads that would take me to the horse barn where I learned to ride. Where I used to drive on weekends with the radio turned up way too loud.

And all of this makes me wonder how I can still say that there’s nothing to see here.

Maybe it doesn’t seem like a lot. Most people don’t see much when they drive through. Just another prairie town, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

But now, to me, there’s so much to see there. It’s the place that made me, the people who raised me. And even though I left, even though I chose to travel halfway around the world, there’s always going to be something to see there.

I always have music playing. I walk around with headphones in every day. When I heard this song, I couldn’t help but think of home, all of those people who said they couldn’t wait to leave our town because there was “nothing” there.

I’m grateful for songs like this that can take me home, even when I’m thousands of kilometers away.