New Stories and Stranger Winds

"For each new morning with its light, for rest and shelter of the night.  For health and food, for love and friends.  For everything thy goodness sends." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

So here I am, an urban girl in a very small town.  For a year.  I have heard more than once "you can do anything for a year", but I would be remiss if I would deny living in a town like this makes me nervous.  No doubt it's a very different pace.  It's not just the time, the people seem different too.  People small talk with each other without looking at their watches.  How did I forget to small talk in my time in the city?  The landscape is wilder.  The wind is different.  The prairie wind is a stranger, it's relentless and warm still.  It still being fall, it's not unfriendly, though I doubt it will be so accommodating in a few months.

I am learning that my assumptions can get me into trouble.  I have always thought of myself as a small-town girl.  And I think I still am.  But one small town is not the same as all other small towns.  I am beginning to think of mine as quite different than my new small town.  I am, perhaps more accurately, a small-city girl.  A small city which depends on recruiting more to its shores for its income; instead of my new small town which needs to stay put.  It needs to till the ground and keep the land, the land with the curious wind, to keep its company throughout the marked seasons.

It's only a beginning for me.  Small towns have long memories, after all.  Yet, my presence here makes this place different, new.  Which is welcome, I think, there is room here for making newness along with the old, long memory.

And with the welcome, there is coffee.  I have, since my arrival, drank an embarrassing amount of it.  I revel in the attitude around the office "it doesn't take much water to make good coffee."  It doesn't take much to bless beginnings and newness.  Coffee, company, and new (to me) stories is certainly a start.

Travels with Cloe

I hate moving.  Of all the necessary occupations in an adult life, it is by far my least favorite.  This time it was highly necessary.  I left my small urban apartment in exchange for a much larger place in a much smaller town.  My new home is in a town of 1,500.  There are corn fields within in the city limits.  And the pace of life, much slower.

I hate moving, but Cloe, my sixteen year old cat, hates it much more.  She has always, in the eight years of our acquaintance, been a poor traveler.  Usually quiet, she will moan, pace, hiss, and make a horrible un-Cloe sounds.  And she will demand my constant attention; bumping my travel mug of coffee as I sip, and then being surprised when the brown liquid splashes her ears.

There's a thing about pets, their owners usually project something of themselves onto their animals.  You ask most pet owners, and they can put a voice to the reactions of their pets, sometimes with their own accents. My fiancee insists that I have projected my hatred of moving unto Cloe.  Perhaps I have.  I would like to think I have my own proclivity to staying put, being in and creating a "home" where I am, and well, wanting to be comfortable.  And I have always thought my cat shares this home-body spirit.

But this time I may be mistaken.  My normally travel adverse cat slept, SLEPT during our move.  As if she trusted where I was taking her, knowing we would be together at least.  She and I have been on many adventures so far in our time together, this one was just one more.  Perhaps I should have as much trust as she.