I was born in the neighborhood of Chicago, plus lived there for our first few years, but i don’t remember it truly well, except the end, which was rather traumatic.
My mother got mugged on the street one day, plus soon after our father packed up our loft plus moved us away from the city, then he told me that he wanted a better life for his family, plus the best place for us was in the same small town where he had grown up.
I will always be grateful that Mom did that for us. It helped our mom emotionally salvage from his attack, plus it opened our eyes to how amazing small town life in IL can be, but outside of Chicago, the entirety of the state of IL is the type of place where you don’t have to lock your doors at night, and this remote IL town was truly small, but I could travel somewhere I wanted on our bike with no fear, and back then cannabis had not yet been legalized in IL, so our Mom 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 our father truly ecstatic. He never once visited a legal IL cannabis dispensary, he kept on growing his own plants until the day he died. Now that I am about to become a father I am considering moving back to that same small IL town.