Ahhh, small town life...

I’ve always live in or near a small, rural Midwestern town. In fact up to this point, I’ve never lived more than 12 miles away from where I was born and am now back to living one mile across the field from my birthplace.


There are so many positive aspects to rural, small town life.


One of those traits being…Everyone knows everyone.


This can be a wonderful thing. If a tragedy or illness strikes, friends and neighbors rally around like no one can imagine. If something out of the ordinary is going on, people tend to notice. Such as, there being a strange vehicle in your driveway loading things out of your house. More than likely someone would call the police knowing it’s not the norm. People just notice stuff and there is some comfort in that.


However, the same “Everyone knows everyone” can be more negative as well.


We live on a state highway just outside of our small town (pop. 1200). We sometimes feel like we live in a fish bowl so to speak. People don’t miss anything.


When we first built our house and didn’t have curtains up yet, an older lady in town who knew my parents stopped me at the post office one day and said, “wow, those are some tall cupboards you have in your house.” Like I said, we live on a state highway, speed limit 55mph and on a curve to boot which means this sweet little ol’ lady was maneuvering a curve on a highway but still looking in our windows. That’s encouraging, huh?!?


If we have people over…”I see you had quite the party at your house the other night” (from a man I ran into in town one day)


A couple of years ago, DH was changing tires on an old pickup truck we had. Said truck sat in our driveway up on jacks for a few weeks while the change was taking place in DH’s spare time. Yes, we had an old pickup truck up on blocks in our driveway for an extended period of time. What of it??? I’ve told you before that I’m a redneck so deal with it! :)  People would ask our sons, friends, whoever why that truck was up on blocks. Does it really matter?


This summer we’ve been moving dirt at our house, leveling what we should have leveled a few years ago. ;) By the sounds of it, this is once again bugging the locals. You think I’m exaggerating? No, not quite. DH & I have both been asked what’s going on. It’s gotten to the point where someone even stopped in at my sister’s workplace in town and asked her. People, seriously! Do you really have to know that bad??? I don’t think I even want to know what the local coffee shop’s “Table of Knowledge” has come up with.


We’ve gotten to the point after all of these years where we’re able to laugh about it (mostly).

This is what our dirt moving looks like. We’ve been trying to think of a really good story(lie) to tell everyone about what we’re doing. DH says to tell people it’s Field of Dreams! If you build it , they will come. I thought we should tell them it’s going to be an inground pool or a Wind turbine site. We might as well make something up. If we don’t, someone else surely will.


Any suggestions on what we say this is going to be? Be creative ~ help us out! ;)