August 3, 2006

Laura Carlson, a Yellow Springs native, lives in town with her children, Liam and Maya Creighton. She tried the city life for a while, but she grew tired of the anonymity and decided to come home to raise her family in a safe and active place.

By Diane Chiddister

Laura Carlson appreciates many things about living again in the town in which she grew up. She loves running into Betty Felder, her former Mills Lawn teacher, and stopping for a chat. She’s glad that both of her children were in the Mills Lawn class of Linnea Denman, a childhood friend. Carlson’s connections to these villagers, and to many others, go back decades, and seeing old friends on a regular basis makes her feel that she and her children are deeply known and cared for.

Carlson also knows what it’s like to live differently. Before moving to the village in 1996, she lived for three years in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. While at first she felt caught up in the excitement and fast pace of city life, she gradually became worn down by the feeling of anonymity, she said in a recent interview. Even people she saw daily in her neighborhood, and in her apartment building, rarely acknowledged her presence

“I felt invisible,” she said.

In 1996 Carlson and her former husband, Sean Creighton, left Manhattan and came to Yellow Springs. At the time they saw the move as a “rest for a while,” before they moved on, she said. But then they decided to have children and realized that Yellow Springs was the place they wanted to raise them.

“It began to seem right to stay here,” she said.

Being back in town reminds Carlson, 44, of the wonderful times she had as a child growing up on Meadow Lane, the daughter of Ben and Chris Carlson. She remembers the good times she had being in school plays, riding around town on her bike and hiking in the Glen, she said.

“It felt free and safe,” she said. “I loved being a kid here.”

Her children Liam, 9, and Maya, 7, are also enjoying many parts of growing up in the village, she believes. She appreciates that in Yellow Springs all the children who want to take part in sports, plays, and the arts have the opportunity to do so, and her children stay busy with many activities. Yellow Springs feels like a safe place to raise children, although Carlson said that things have changed everywhere since she grew up, and her children don’t have quite as much freedom as she had. But she sees them thriving.

“They’re having a good childhood,” she said. “I can’t think of anything they’re missing out on.”

But there are ways in which her children’s experience contrasts with her own childhood, Carlson said, and those ways seem to reflect how the town has changed in the past 30 years. While she remembers about 75 kids in her Mills Lawn grades, her children’s grades are much smaller. And she remembers about half of her childhood friends being African-American, compared to a much smaller percentage of African American children at Mills Lawn now.

“I’m pretty shocked at such a decrease in the population of children,” she said.

Asked about the hardest aspect of living in Yellow Springs, Carlson didn’t hesitate.

“It’s expensive,” she said.

Now a single parent, Carlson feels the sting of high taxes. And while she currently has sufficient work as a free-lance editor and the director of the Antioch Writers’ Workshop, she knows that if her editing work lessens, she will be hard-pressed to find other work in the village. Maintaining her own health insurance is expensive, she said, and she wishes that free-lancers such as herself could benefit from cooperative health insurance.

But she does get by financially, she said. And even though some things about living in Yellow Springs challenge her, she feels that overall it’s a good place to be a single parent.

“I have great friends,” she said. “It’s easier to make friends here than most places.”

It’s easier, she believes, because many people who live in Yellow Springs seem to share the same values and often the same interests. Many villagers share her interest in writing, and as a parent, she finds immediate common concerns with others who have young children.

“There’s a lot of interconnectedness,” she said. “It’s reassuring, the number of sane, caring people.

Overall, according to Carlson, “There’s not a lot that’s difficult” about living in Yellow Springs.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com