Courtesy greenerpasture.com

Corona, California, is where I have spent most of my 33 years. It definitely isn’t Mayberry, with over 150,000 residents, but it might as well be. Corona is extremely boring.

It has changed a lot in the 30 years I have lived here, with now a few Starbucks and the old Alpha Beta becoming a Sprouts. But I love driving down Grand where the houses are over a hundred years old.

Courtesy assests.blog.hemmings.com

In fact, in probably the 20s Grand Avenue was a racetrack, and my old junior high, which was once Corona High School and was probably built in the thirties, actually has a bomb shelter. And after Lucy and Desi’s divorce, he had a house here!

Driving down Main Street, you notice the acres of orange trees that are now homes, three feet apart. There is now a signal on every block instead of a stop sign.

But as busy as Corona is, it for the most part, it still has the small town feel. People I went to kindergarten and first grade with still live here and are raising their children here.

We have talked about moving. As very dull as Corona is, I would miss it. I learned to ride a two wheeler in front of our first house, babysat the neighborhood kids, and visited with Mary, the seventy-year-old woman across the street, her complaining about our uppity next door neighbors as comforting as anything I can remember.

We will most likely move when Dad retires, in ten years or so. He likes South Carolina.

It’s extremely corny, but as unpredictable as life can be, it’s nice to have a little certainty. Corona, California, definitely provides that.