A lot of my best memories come from Illinois, even though I never lived there.
My folks originally come from Illinois, but they moved away when my mom was still pregnant with me.
Some years later they took me back to visit. The first visit was boring, the second visit a little better, and by the time I was 14 I was eager to get back into the farmland and visit my cousins. The expression “it’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there” comes to mind. My cousins yearned to escape the confines of farming country, but I was content to spend a few weeks in Illinois and smoke as much cannabis as I could get my hands on. There was a lot of it, too, because my Illinois cousins had nothing better to do than get high, so they did it a lot. I was a little jealous at first, because there was so much wide-open farmland in this part of rural Illinois that my cousins could grow as many cannabis plants as they wanted. In fact they both spent a lot of time cultivating cannabis, because they had so little else to do. They dreamed of moving out of the Illinois backwoods and to a major city. This is why they started selling cannabis, because it was the only way they could save up enough money to move to a better part of Illinois. It was easier for me, because I knew come the end of my vacation I would leave Illinois behind and head back to my normal life.