I went to Vince Anna’s Italian Restaurant with my sister, niece and parents tonight. It’s a really old school Italian place, the kind of place with deer heads on the wall, dark wood paneling and a wood stove, with Italian food that hasn’t changed in decades served in dishes that probably date back to fifties at least in style.

The food is good but nothing exceptional, what you would expect from an old fashioned Italian restaurant from fifty years ago. It was a nice family get together although you have to know the place is on its last legs – since COVID it’s only open by reservation so not to have to be open on nights when nobody shows up. I can’t imagine such a throwback – on a remote rural road that once caterered to tourists of long gone resorts – has much of a future with the older generation dying out and taxes so high. I can’t imagine they are a profitable business anymore but probably the folks who run it it just can’t imagine giving it up. Stubborn like the dairymen with tie stall barns.

Years ago we would go there as a family as a special treat maybe once every once and a rare occasion. They used to have miniature golf and we would have pizza. The miniature golf course is long gone although the food and pizza is the same from 25 years ago. It was fun though to have a trip back to my childhood at least for a little while. Back to a world, all but completely gone except for the memories, somewhat painful.

Every time I go back to Greenville though I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I remember bits and pieces of my childhood but the town today seems so foreign to me. I do remember the old mechanical horse at Bryant’s. Still there even though the model trains are gone since Bryant’s became Tops. I was more than happy to leave my hometown as I went to college, I barely went back turning myself towards my urban career path while gravating more towards the deep rural and wilderness for recreation and getting away from it all.

Indeed, going back to Greenville today everything just seems so much smaller, more urban and dense then it used to be. Even though the population has stagnated, it just seems like the lots are smaller and a lot closer together. Five or ten acres doesn’t seem like a lot of land, neighbors way too close. Maybe I’m just spoiled from all the time I’ve spent in the Adirondacks with the 1/4 mile or more separation between campsites and hundreds of square miles of wilderness.

Maybe it’s that I’ve associated so deeply in my identity with the cowboys and farmers who often cultivate hundreds if not thousands of acres of land which they can do a lot more on without causing a nuisance by nature of pure distance. Or the much wilder culture of the west where people are free to own and shoot whatever guns they have, have big bonfires and mud trucks. Things that by their very nature need a lot of land to dillute pollution and avoid harming others.

The truth is the Greenville of my memories of childhood probably never existed. It was pretty exurban back then with long distance commuters and my parents still had their five acre lot with the same neighbors. Things were probably a lot more regulated and less wild than I remember them. Sure there were the farm kids I hung out with that had a very different experience then myself but it was no Allegany County, much less rural Missouri or Montana.

I do look at land prices and properties locally out in the country, usually with 25 acres or more. Even if some day I have the money, I don’t know if I would ever want to make the leap in New York State with the gun restrictions, taxes and limits on open burning. But for now, it’s good to dream and save and invest while I have my good paying job. While I think state policies are wonderful for the urban life and good for the consumer, I am not so sure if the high cost of everything in New York State for homesteading or the rural life, especially in an off-grid property.