We’ve often wondered why, when returning home from a vacation, the closer you get to home, the quicker you want to get there. Everyone probably has his/ her own answer, depending on many factors. I dare say very few feel the other way, such as, “Let’s put it (getting home) off for another day or two.”

The way it happens at our house is, as we get closer, we decide to “drive on in” even though it’s probably farther than we wish to travel. So we usually arrive late, darkthirty, and hurriedly at leastpartially unload the car and fall into bed.

It is good to get away, to free the mind from those things that seem so important but which so often are not, to see some new territory, do some things not on the regular schedule, eat some different combinations of food, and just relax.

Coming home to Northwest Arkansas, Gravette in particular, is refreshing. Things always happen in the area and the town. But usually (there goes that word again) there are no real surprises.

The big surprise, when we drove into town last week, was to pass the big two-story, historical house on Second Avenue Northeast. It wasn’t there. All that remained was a smokestained foundation and the remnants of plumbing and other rubbish - all that was left of a house that was at least a century old. In fact, it was home of the fi rst mayor of Gravette, in 1899-1907, as told in a report by Susan Holland in last week’s Westside Eagle Observer.

Having sat vacant for several years, the house showed its weariness of existing. And, as its new owner discovered, restoring it was prohibitively unrealistic. So the old house, which probably could write many stories concerning early-day Gravette and its citizens, served one lastpurpose: a training exercise for Gravette’s volunteer fi re department.

The old house held an attachment to the Gravette News Herald that a couple of years ago combined with papers in Gentry and Decatur to form the Westside Eagle Observer. It was in that house that a very talented pianist, and I’ve heard a bridge player, lived. Nova Teeter wrote social items for the News Herald for many years. And a good job she did, tracking down all the scuttlebutt of goings on in town, all of those little items about people, their doings, their social activities, including clubs and churches. Well, you get the picture.

It was a time when all of those things were an important part of a standalone community, one that was self-contained and onein which everyone knew everyone else in town. Them days are gone. Now we hardly have any time to say hello to our neighbors as we all hurry off to today’s important things. Main Street shows the sign that is so prevalent in smalltown America. We miss those days. But we move on.

It takes people to create a community feeling. It takes more than school activities, more than ball games, more than church events in the dozen or so churches. It takes personal interaction. It takes a psyche that’s missing from today’s world. But we move on.

Gravette, Gentry and Decatur are all good communities. But it will take continued effort to maintain a community-wide spirit to salvage that togetherness that truly binds a community together - a spirit that, until recent years, bound our nation together.

Progress, whatever that means, is necessary, invaluable and impossible to prevent. But “community” also has a core value that so often weakens and/or eventually gets shunted aside, just like it showed in dozens - hundreds - of small communities we drove through in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi and, yes, Arkansas.

Am I becoming a cynic in my old age? Are you? We all, collectively, must fi ght to prevent that happening as we grow the community spirit in our communities.

Dodie Evans is the editor emeritus of the Westside Eagle Observer and may be contacted by email at [email protected].

News, Pages 5 on 10/09/2013