Outside my front door is a small town in a Midwestern county where about ninety-eight percent of the land is used for farming. Well, not right outside my door. Across the road is a plowed field that was in corn last year and will be in soy beans this year. The small town is about a mile away. Technically it’s a city, but with a population of about five thousand, it can’t muster the pretense to be anything but a small town. On the other hand, it is the county seat with all the hustle and bustle of county government, which results in a rush hour at the end of the day that can last eighteen minutes. Rush hour in the morning lasts a little longer during the school year thanks to school buses, say twenty-four minutes.
If you’re not sure if you live in a small town here are some things to look for. Is there a grain elevator within the city limits? Shouldn’t be hard to find. Any plowed fields inside the city limits? Not all those big open spaces are parks with playgrounds and ball fields. Are massive harvesters and cultivators and sprayers that fill two lanes of a county road and obey their own unwritten traffic laws a common sight, especially in spring and fall? How about billboards advertising crop insurance? Or better seed for better yields, the high school basketball team’s championship record, or the county 4H fair in the next county? Those are all pretty good clues.
We lived in the Upper West Side of New York during Times Square’s squalid Taxi Driver years, in Southern California for the Northridge Earthquake and two episodes of civil disturbance, a suburb of Boston for a Stanley Cup Championship, an NBA championship, three World Series Championships, and five Super Bowl Championships (I’m pretty sure other stuff happened, too), and I have some advice on how to deal with bad traffic and terrible commutes: never get behind a self-propelled corn harvester on a two-lane county road during harvest season because that behemoth owns the road. You’re going to wish you were stuck on 128 outside of Boston between Totten Pond Road and Route 20 instead. At least there you could abandon your car and walk to Jake n Joes for a couple beers waiting for traffic to clear.
There are some perks to small town life, however. If you have any business at the bank or post office and there are two people ahead of you in line then someone must be on break. There are longer lines at the fireworks stand than the post office. If you’re looking for a reputable plumber or electrician, just ask your neighbor. You’ll hear the full curriculum vitae of every contractor in town and an impassioned pitch for the kid who just started but he’s someone’s cousin’s next door neighbor who went to 4H along with the cousin’s kids and is a real nice guy. More importantly you’ll hear about which contractors to avoid completely and who does a good job but they drink while they work in the afternoon.
As an amateur landscaper I am grateful for a first class nursery in our town that carries great plants, grows some of their own over the winter, and will help you diagnose what is causing the leaves on your weigela to look more like arugula. In the last couple of years we’ve seen some restaurants close but some great new ones have opened. We’ve got a little French themed bistro which also offers great cajun food (because it’s kind of French, right?), an excellent high-end eatery where you can’t even hope to get a table after 6:00 without a reservation, a local landmark restaurant on the lake with the best bleu cheese dressing on the planet and excellent Fettuccine Alfredo, three restaurants with fantastic catfish (“Best catfish by a dam site;” guess where it’s located), excellent Mexican restaurants, and outstanding bakeries. We have almost enough fantastic ice cream and frozen yogurt shops in town to help you forget that we don’t have a killer Chinese take-out place. Almost.
We have coffee shops, and maybe I’m a little jaundiced by my experience in, ahem, big cities, but no cozy little place with awesome java where you can sit and read a book for an hour or so. But, I’m okay with it. Really.
Beyond that we have a great hardware store, good enough grocery stores, and lots of bait and tackle outlets, which is kind of a big deal when you have two lakes in town. And, a fireworks stand that is open nearly year-round. So, take that you fancy big city types!
We’ve got churches of almost every Evangelical stripe and a bustling Catholic church (Our Lady of the Lakes, what else?). Our little liturgical church is in the next town over, a full six minute drive. The local high school has fantastic music and theater programs that offer first rate programs. All they need is a little more rehearsal. We have a cinema (it has two screens, so it’s not just a movie theater) with first run movies, and a drive-in theater open Memorial Day to Labor Day. So, we don’t think we’re missing a lot and the things we don’t have are the reasons we moved here.
I’ve developed great interest in the rhythm of modern farming. The average farm in our county is privately owned and plants about 500 acres. That translates into a lot of families that are working like crazy year-round to make a buck. There are such large dollars involved in farming, the land values, the equipment, the machinery, the buildings, and on and on, it sounds like they’re all gazillionaires. But, it’s a high stakes game and you can hope to have a couple of really good years out of ten and three or four lousy years. Farm families work like mad just to stay in the game. Why? Farm life has meaning. There’s impossibly long hours, anxiety, exhilaration, and occasional triumph. Need I say that this approach to life creates some high quality humans?
Besides being captive to the pageantry of the seasons in a farm community, we have wildlife. We try not to get too attached to deer and give them nicknames because, well, to everything there is a season. We have the usual Midwestern roll call of species and, for the most part, except for moles, groundhogs, and skunks, I’ve made peace with them. There is one clan of critters that I’m not particularly keen on. Remember the field right across the road? It’s inhabited by field mice, and they’re welcome to it. However, why are they called “field mice” if they fancy a holiday in our garage when the combines are roaring?
What Then? 