Small Town Love

When I was 8, we moved from California to Wisconsin.  This seemed like a great idea to my gypsy parents.  I think we had already moved nearly 12 times in my short life and you see, they wanted more family support in dealing with my then baby sister’s medical problems (my mom is from Minnesota). They also wanted to raise us in a less, shall we say, ‘chaotic’ environment (in 1977 Woodacre, CA, there was marijuana, and who knows what else, aplenty...our own backyard garden notwithstanding).  I didn’t really understand what “chaotic environment” meant, I was used to hearing things like “Don’t eat the green brownies, Gina” and I sure as hell didn’t want to be dragged off to some Laura Ingalls Wilderesque town in middle America!  So, I ran away.  Well, I did the 8-year-old version of running away, which involved taking a couple of friends and “hiding” under a bridge near the horse stable where my pony was kept (yes, I was one of those little girls who had a pony, ok?).  I’m sure it took about three minutes for them to find me, and off we went, to Wisconsin and my indefinite future as a small town girl.  

My mom reminds me that I said during that time, “I don’t like Grantsburg and I don’t like the G!” And you know, I didn’t. I mean, sure, I made friends eventually (once they stopped teasing me about my “accent”). But, seriously, who thinks it’s a good idea to move to 40 acres of wilderness (with a quarter of a mile long driveway and no plan for snow removal), in a cabin that had only ever been used seasonally, with two kids (one of them quite sick) and two parents, one of whom grew up in a fancy house in Philadelphia and went to ‘prep school’ and the other of whom hadn’t lived in the midwest since she was a kid?? Well, I’ll tell you who. Hippies.  And while you could argue that my parents were not exactly the full-on “drop out” hippies of the time, if you compare them to the vanilla, straight-laced, midwestern folk we encountered in Grantsburg, my parents may as well have named me “Sunshine”. Oh, wait...

Mostly, I hated being so damn conspicuous all the time. Burned into my memory is the feeling I had every time we walked into a local restaurant, everyone getting quiet (if they were talking to each other at all) and turning to look at us.  Oh, boy, did I ever hate that!!  And rest assured, if these people went back to a conversation of their own at all, they were going to be drowned out in a minute by my LOUD family.  They were sure to hear all kinds of embarrassing family secrets that my sister would blurt out, and how could you even get mad at her because it was “just the way she was”.  So, you just had to bear it.  My dad’s voice was just naturally louder than every single other man in the entire town of Grantsburg.  He couldn’t help it.  But for me, it was mortifying.

Sometimes, we would go to visit my aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, and as we got to that place on 35W where you can just start to see the Minneapolis skyline, my stomach would jump with anticipation.  In the city, nobody even gave a shit about my family!!  We weren’t the loudest!!  People seemed to have their own problems!!  I loved the anonymity, I loved peering through the 3rd floor skylight of my aunt and uncle’s house and watching the airplanes.  I dreamt that I’d live in a place like that someday.

But, we always went back home to Grantsburg.  We lived so far out of town, I couldn’t walk or ride bike to my friend’s houses and because we lived in the bug-infested woods, I was often walking around with an eye swollen shut from whatever insect-of-the-day had bitten me.  I dreamed of moving to town, and one day I got my wish!  We moved to town, but that had it’s own set of issues.  Now, I had to walk to school, and back then, it seemed like they didn’t cancel school unless it was more than 30 degrees below zero.  I’m not sure if that’s true, but I do have a distinct memory of walking to school with my eyelashes freezing together (my giant 80s hair was still in place, however, because far be it from me to wear a hat and mess up that spiral perm I saved all my babysitting money to get).  We also had neighbors in town, and so there was even more opportunity for embarrassment over my family, although considering what some of the rest of the neighborhood was up to, I probably shouldn’t have worried...

I took swimming lessons at the Grantsburg Pool and eventually went on to get my Lifeguard Certificate. This was a real highlight, because now that we lived in town, I could ride my bike to all my swim lessons and also have lots of fun all summer long at the pool. I finished at the top of my Life Saving class (I was a strong swimmer and LOVED the idea of being a lifeguard, instead of working for the crazy religious freaks who ran the A&W or babysitting & being driven home by creepy middle aged men).  But when it came time to hire the lifeguards, everybody else in the class got a job but me. All their parents were teachers and coaches, and my dad was a pot head. 

Fuck small town living. I made a plan.

I decided to get out and get out as soon as I possibly could. I wasn’t exactly a fabulous student. Nobody was, really. I finished 4th in my graduating class with only a 3.3 GPA.  Can you imagine? I had spent my entire life enduring the big “sit down” after my parents attended conferences, listening to the “all the teachers say you could be doing so much better and that you aren’t working up to your potential” lecture.  That, combined with some pretty uninspiring teachers (one English teacher spent more time sleeping than awake during class, and several people wrote their grades into his grade book while he sawed logs, completely unaware....our biology teacher used to leave our class alone regularly to stand on the hill outside and smoke), combined into what became a pretty complacent attitude.  However, the bar was set so low for graduation standards, I had managed to meet all the requirements halfway through my senior year.  I decided to leave and attend college early. But, the guidance counselor was confused.  Leave early? Why would I do that? Go to college? Why? You see, all the boys usually go into the military or a small college nearby and the girls usually attend a community college for office skills training...THIS WAS ACTUALLY SAID!!!!!  

So at this point, I really just wanted to stick it up the guidance counselor’s, and everyone else in the community’s ass, and so I decided I would apply to the largest college in the area...in the midwest even...the University of Minnesota. Oh, oh goodness.  Gina, surely you don’t want to go to a college so LARGE! But these people just didn’t understand.  I’d spent years and years feeling out of place in their dumb town.  Trying to fit in, but never really fitting in.  Getting into trouble and doing stupid things just because I was bored and unchallenged and probably depressed. Nobody, but nobody, was going to tell me what to do.

The guidance counselor tried to stop me, would have stopped me actually.  Years later when I was on a school board, I realized that he was probably under pressure to keep students enrolled to be sure the district could get funding from its already waning student population.  There was no doubt that MY best interests were his last concern.  And I will forever be grateful to my parents, for basically forcing him to sign the paperwork to let me go early to college.  And go early I did, in January of my senior year of high school.  My parents moved away from Grantsburg shortly after I left and I really never looked back for many, many years.  

It took a long time for me to grow up and get past it all.  I became very bitter about small town life and became almost angry when someone voiced romantic fantasies about what it might be like.  I remember once in college, when I went back to Grantsburg and bumped into one of my former teachers/beloved coach in town, he laughed in my face when he heard I was becoming a teacher (“YOU, a teacher?!”) he scoffed.  Dickhead.  I worked my ass off and got on the Dean’s List, for the express purpose of putting it in the small town newspaper in Grantsburg, (note: this is the same paper where they would actually publish news about who was hosting company from “out of town” on any given weekend...”Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Johnson entertained her sister-in-law and nephew who traveled from Forest Lake for the weekend”).  I was so happy that my name was in the Burnett County Sentinel, on the Dean’s List at the University of Minnesota.  I just kept on having something to prove.

Year and years later, with all kinds of water under the bridge and some pretty hard lessons learned, I have inadvertently, accidentally, at times begrudgingly, found my way back to small town Wisconsin in a variety of ways...

I married a guy who, when I met him, lived and worked in a “big” small town, propelling me back (at least somewhat) to a life of seeing someone you know every time you go out anywhere in town.

I reconnected with some of my girlfriends from high school, who have proven to be an amazing support and unconditional love beyond any female friendship I have ever had.

And, last spring, my husband and I bought a cabin in rural, Western Wisconsin!  We are just 10 miles from Luck, where I took my driving test on actual city streets, just like we did it back in the day in small town Wisconsin! Crazy stuff, people.

It’s been an interesting journey.  And I don’t know if I could have said it before this very day, but I have fallen in love with small town Wisconsin.

I love that when a tree falls on our power line on a Sunday morning at the cabin, I can find an electrician who answers his phone and would be happy to come over, but I’ll have to wait until he finishes the breakfast he’s having with his daughter. He doesn’t give two shits if he loses the business, because he is going to finish breakfast with his daughter and that’s that. I also love that he brought his daughter with him, and she helped bring him tools and tossed rocks into the lake and waited patiently while he worked.  And I love that he apologized for the Sunday rates, which were slightly less than the normal weekday rates I pay in the city.

I love that on my bike ride I smell fresh air and see the beauty in farms, woods, animals...beauty that I just couldn’t see when I was a snarky teenager.  And I love that everyone (except that asshole yesterday in the red mini cooper who almost ran me into the ditch), waves and smiles warmly at me when they pass me on the country roads.

I love that when I asked the lady at the meat market if the meat was organic, she said, “Well, I don’t know if it’s exactly organic, but I’ve been to the farms myself and the animals are wandering around, not stuck in pens” and when I said “Oh, they’re free range?” she said, “Well, there are so many words for things these days, but yes, they are walking around eating grass and they look very healthy”.  And then she tossed in a free bone for our dog Lola, with a big smile on her face.  I love that lady, dammit.

I love that when a contractor comes to give us an estimate on something, we do a lot of unnecessary and excessive chatting, and the conversation and entire interaction moves very slowly, as if he has nowhere else to be. Here in these small communities, the pace of life is. just. a. little. slower. I love that.

I love that after purchasing “local” maple syrup at a store in town, we drove by the very farm where it is produced on the way back to the cabin.

I love that when I go to the local nursery to buy mulch and I climb up onto the pile of landscape block to help the guy get the bags down, he just lets me.  He doesn’t say, “Oh, ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to get down, we’ll get that for you”, like they always do at the big box stores, where you just know they’ve had seven hours of lawyer-created safety videos jammed down their throats to the point where they can’t even let a lady help. And I’m perfectly capable of helping, you know.

Yes, I’m still a city snob and when I go to the cabin, I have to bring my good bread and my fresh, organic produce and my “just right” salsa and the wine I like.  Yes, I can’t really go out to dinner here as a vegetarian unless I was to subsist on grilled cheese and cheese curds (which, after a certain number of cocktails, I kind of do...).  

But you know, when someone in Wisconsin asks me where I’m from, they KNOW where I’m talking about when I say Grantsburg.  And suddenly, I’m one of them.  At last.