Every Reason I Go Back
by Loree Gaikowski, Director, Wessington Springs Area Chamber and Development Corporation
It has been your senior year. Many ups and downs along the way but many of these last few months have been difficult. Soon your journey into adulthood will begin and your current life will become memories… Memories of home.
There is a Jake Owen song I love called “Every Reason I Go Back”. It speaks of everything small town. Nothing really changes, everything feels the same, same friends, same parents caring too much about where you’ve been and what you’re doing. And then he says this… It’s every reason that I left, and EVERY reason I go back. As you spread your wings and fly, absence will make your heart grow fonder. It may only be a few months, or it may be years that pass but your memories of home will push their way back to the surface of your heart and I’m here to tell you that’s ok. Let them.
Yes, you missed some pretty important events these last few months, but you also were granted a gift. You will be the first generation leaving high school with a clear understanding of remote learning aka remote work. With this comes freedom to live and work wherever you choose or take your trades you have learned along the way and open your own business in a community that will love and support you. Opportunity does await you in rural South Dakota. If I asked you what businesses you or your parents would like to have had access to in our community while growing up, odds are you could easily name a few. Local development corporations in many rural areas have the know how and tools to help you get started. You hold the key to filling those voids for us.
Your life is your journey. You have been firsthand witnesses to seeing a community rise to save their own during difficult times. You lived it, you felt it. Tuck that feeling in your heart, for that is the feeling of home. It will shape you, guide your decisions, you may find yourself taking it for granted a time or two, but it will always be a part of you and it will always be here.
So go, spread your wings and fly. Discover your own paths knowing you always hold a key to your home, where you grew up. Where every reason you left just may be every reason you come back.
