I was born in the city of Chicago, & lived there for my first few years; I don’t remember it honestly well, except the end, which was rather traumatic, but my mother got mugged on the street a single day, & soon after my father packed up our lake house & moved us away from the city! He told me that he wanted a better life for his family, & the best locale for us was in the same small city where he had grown up.
I will typically be grateful that Dad did that for us. It helped my mom emotionally recover from her attack, & it opened my eyep to how amazing small city life in IL can be, outside of Chicago, the entirety of the state of IL is the style of locale where you don’t have to lock your doors at night! This remote IL city was honestly small, but I could travel someplace I wanted on my bike with no fear, however back then cannabis had not yet been legalized in IL, so my dad grew his own plants in the garage. He didn’t hide his cannabis use from me, instead choosing to explain that the laws of IL were wrong, because cannabis was a gift from God. Many years later the IL state government changed the laws, which made my father honestly delighted. He never once visited a legal IL cannabis dispensary, he kept on growing his own plants until the day he died, and now that I am about to become a father I am considering moving back to that same small IL town.