my hometown

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let’s just pretend for a minute that you came to visit me in my home town. wouldn’t that be just the bees knees? i love taking folks to my home town for the first time and showing them around.

white oak is very small, (population of less than 6,000 – pretty sure there are almost that many kids in the high school in west monroe) so in terms of entertainment and such it doesn’t have a lot to offer. which explains why i didn’t get up to much but trouble as a teenager… but it is where i am from. it is where i truly call home. 🙂

here are all the things we’d do.

first of all – you can’t come to east texas with me and not meet + visit with my dad. and you can’t visit with my dad unless we do it at a gun show.

p.s. – this is not my dad! just some guy trying to sell my dad on a hunt in south texas. 🙂

that’s right – a room full of ammunition and testosterone with a lovely dash of *cozy fireside* wafting up from the scentsy table so the ladies have somewhere to congregate.

i would never make you pose with a stuffed animal head for a picture.

okay – maybe i would.

and oooh looky here. this man has the right idea!!

then after the gun show we would drive through the windy, hilly roads of deep east texas and pull over to take pictures of deer resting under trees

if you get really lucky, we might even spot the albino deer that lives down here.

then we would head back to white oak for some lunch… but not before checking out this sweet tool sale we saw a sign for on the side of the road!

perhaps you could pick up a set of wrenches?

or a bucket of nails?

chris walked out with a new pair of waders and a bucket of random stuff that set us back $2 whole dollars.

when we finally got back to white oak, we’d lunch at the best pizza place in town, which, coincidentally, is the only pizza place in town. we could walk over to the roughneck next door and get a fountain dr. pepper. theirs rival sonic’s.

then we could run through the drive through at this lovely little place… chris calls it the “texas stop sign”. what kind of blizzard would you like? it’s on me!

here is an interesting little fact. this dairy queen in my tiny home town, is the world’s largest dairy queen. they even have t-shirts as proof!

then i would take you on a quick tour of where i went to school. i say quick because it is about three buildings, all on one campus. yep – in elementary school we walked to the high school for pep rallys. in middle school, for lunch every day we had to walk to the high school cafeteria to eat. crazy, eh?

ready to start the tour?

here is the middle school where i used to sit in a prime seat around the fishpond (that had no water or fish in it) and chat with my friends before school started. we also had morning pep rallies on thursdays that i always thought were the coolest.

here is football field and behind it is the elementary school. i spent many many many friday nights on this field taking pictures, cheering on the sidelines, dancing when the band played and lining up mom’s to cheer the football boys back on to the field after half time.

i still love friday night football 🙂

so i mentioned “the roughneck” earlier. and i’m guessing some of you might be scratching your head and wondering just what the heck is a roughneck?

a roughneck, simply put, is any hardworking individual that wipes sweat off their brow and keeps on going.

what the school mascot is, however, is an oilfield worker, wielding a hard had and a heavy wrench to get the job done. you might pictures an off-shore guy with dirty jeans tucked into his boots, a leather-tanned neck and dirt under his nails.

i picture my dad.

i talk more about what a roughneck is in this post.

this is the back of the weight room at the field house. i spent many afternoons here pretending to lift weights so i could watch a few certain boys work out. yep – i was that girl i never want my daughter to be! 🙂

oh hey high school – fancy meetin you here!

this is the main hallway of the high school. off to the left there are three hallways that lead back to the classrooms and lockers. i remember how i felt like a tiny fish in a huge pond the first day of high school. and now looking back – that place is itty bitty!

when i was a senior, we went to state for volleyball. we lost in the final game. in 2010, our record was finally surpassed by the volleyball team. if you clicked over to the top five post i referenced earlier, you already know i cried my eyeballs out when that happened. here is their big fancy sign in front of the school.

the only thing that keeps me from being too bitter about it is that were it not for my senior class, that sign would have no where to stand! see – the brick part came from us. so there you go.

snark intended.

this is the long walkway we came down every day as middle schoolers to eat in the high school cafeteria. as sixth graders it scared the heck out of us. as seventh graders, eh – whatevs. and as eighth graders, it morphed from “OMGEEE i cannot wait to not have to walk down here every day” to “holy crap i’m scared of high schoolers mommy hold me” throughout the year.

along that walkway there are a few benches that have been purchased by different classes. this one is my favorite.

it sits in front of what used to be the meredith building. one day i will write a post all about the meredith building. but just know it was an old and quite historical building that had to be torn down because the school couldn’t afford to have the asbestos removed from it. it was a pretty sad event my senior year.

anyways – this is me in front of the cafeteria that stands where the meredith building used to be. chris did a great job with this picture and God hooked me up with a pretty sweet breeze to make my hair look fab, no?

on a side note – i realize that i am pictured in this shirt more than a normal person should be pictured in one single article of clothing. but really it is the softest, coziest and most awesome shirt ever. and we beat stanford. so there you go.

so the tower behind me is the original bell tower from the meredith building and still has the bell in it. i told you – awesome building. underneath it, they sold bricks from the meredith building and had them engraved with your name and graduation year. some are memorials. some are just because. i took pictures of a few that stood out to me.

clearly – this is my family:

i cried when i saw this because it reminded me of how dumb i thought it was when my mom did it. and here i was searching it out!

this is one of my best friend’s brother who died one week before his high school graduation. he was the same age as my brother. it probably goes without saying that it was one of the most tragic things i have ever had to go through.

this is uncle bob – the other writer in our family. he has penned a couple of books (<--- don't click that link if you are an aggie FYI) and i've always said that i get my writing gene from him. (by the way if you are reading this bob, hi! and i know you are cringing at the no capital letters but at least i know how to spell surprise now!)

directly across the street from this is what appears to just be an empty parking lot. and by day that is truly its identity. but come nightfall, at least when i was still in school, there were always at least four or five cars parked at what we called “the pit” on weekends. it was just where everyone went because, like i said, there was nothing else to do!

also – if nina and i had ever sneaked out of her parent’s house, and should we have had her boyfriend pick us up, this is where we would have walked to. hypothetically speaking of course.

so now that you’ve seen where i spent all my time learning and playing, let’s go see where i grew up!

this is the house i call home. my dad still lives here. i will understand if he sells it one day but i really hope he never does. my bedroom was the last window on the right. now that is the computer room.

we lived next door to this. do you know what this is? what do you call it? in white oak they are either called oil horses or pump jacks. and they are everywhere! i got so used to sleeping to it’s familiar bum-bmmmmmmmmmmm as it faithfully did its job that when i moved out i noticed i couldn’t hear it anymore. it took a while to get used to sleeping without it.

this is the magnolia tree in the front yard. i had a perfect spot where i could climb up in there and be totally hidden but see everything in the neighborhood. right before the magnolia’s bloomed i would tear the bulbs off the tree and peel back all the petal layers until i got to the center and then i’d spread the “matchsticks” around the yard hoping for more trees. it never worked. 🙁

just a quick trip down white oak road…

… will bring us to the house i was living in (exactly one mile from my home) when i met chris.

we rented this house but if we had the money and opportunity to live in white oak again i would buy this house in a hearbeat. i loved it!

and this is the famous duplex, which is going on it’s 10th or so year of housing someone in our family. (read the legacy here)

on your way out of town, make sure you stop at the mcdonald’s on highway 80 and pay homage to the first fast food restaurant built in white oak (besides, of course, the dairy queen).

so that is it – everything there is to do in my tiny home town. or at least those are all the things we would start with. 🙂 what is your favorite thing about your home town??