Will it Last?

It took 43 years of living on the West Coast, and then moving back to the Midwest to realize this is where we belong. After living in big Cities, the small town is a wonderful experience. No traffic, no homeless, no riots, cheerful workers everywhere, the grocery stores, the restaurants, hardware stores, retail, and even in the government buildings (most of the time, except for the DMV), but also not much shopping to speak of. It seems everyone wants to have a conversation and are genuinely interested in what you have to say. It’s beautiful here with the ever changing lakes, so many of them, each with their own personality. The thunderstorms, the owls at night, the loons, why did it take us so long to move? When you’ve lived on the West Coast as long as we have, it’s pretty scary to move back to a small midwestern town with a season called winter. It could snow any day and we don’t have coats or boots or gloves or a Yeti cup to keep our drinks warm. Will we hate the winter? Time will tell.

Our remodel starts in a week. We’re now moving back into my Aunt’s house. We didn’t think we moved much into our house as there are still boxes piled in the garage, but we moved in more than we thought and now we’re taking it all out again. It will be worth it, the longer you wait for something, the more you appreciate it as the saying goes and I know that’s true. Meanwhile we can hop on over to Nelson, a small town of about 150 people which has a bar called the Corral that attracts people from all over. Why? At this bar you can “shoot the minnow” The bartender will drop a minnow into a shot glass with the beverage of your choice, usually Tequila. If you can swallow that minnow in one gulp you get a tee shirt that says: “I Shot the Minnow.” Now how is that for small town America?