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.