Well, it’s been quite a week. Finally (!) figured out what all these pieces ruminating around in my brain are taking shape to be, and I am in the process of beginning my new “work-in-process” in earnest.
Moving has gone well. Other than random piles in the basement that I’m working on building into NOT random bins, we’re pretty much settled and setting in to home here. Having more space has made keeping things decluttered so much easier. The true test will be in a couple weeks, when the girls move back home with all their stuff. I’ve done everything I could to urge them to take a storage box and keep some stuff at college, and failed. So we’ll be cramming most of their worldly possessions into our van –and the car in a couple weeks.
Gradually, I’m finding landmarks again. It’s been a while since I experienced this kind of disorientation, when even a simple grocery store trip requires the aid of Google Maps, just to be sure I don’t get turned around. Living in a town of 700 with no grocery store, no hardware –only a gas station, a lumber yard, and a Dollar General– is giving me an itch to read more Wendell Berry. We’re about 30 minutes’ drive from Sioux Falls and just under 20 minutes from the nearest hardware and grocery in Dell Rapids. On the bright side, it forces me to meal plan (or be put at the mercy of the aisles of mostly shelf-stable packaged food at Dollar General) and makes it necessary to pre-plan our trips into Sioux Falls, in order to hit all the places we need in as few trips as possible.
However, a trip to the local library (basically a bookmobile branch of the Sioux Falls library with four walls, open three half-days a week) scored me a couple books of local Colton history: a Bicentennial edition from 1976 and another one from 1989, the town’s centennial year. Colton had a local high school as recently as 1966, and an elementary school that closed some time in the last 20 years. We’re directly across the street from the old school site. The building has been torn down since the 1989 book was published, and it’s now a bus garage for the new consolidated school district. The grocery store closed not due to a lack of business, I’ve been told, but the increasing difficulty of getting suppliers to come out here and deliver stock. I’m not sure what to think of that, other than that it’s depressing that we’ve become so dependent on vehicles and bedroom towns and Dollar General stores that pay minimum wage to people willing to work long hours doing three jobs at once.
And that brings me to the next challenge: helping my kids find summer jobs. There’s always the retirement home in town. Get a CNA (often available at little to no cost through an employer), and you have yourself a guaranteed job just about anywhere in the midwest. But that takes a certain kind of person who I’m not sure my kids are, exactly. Still, it’s a job I’m encouraging them to consider. Then there’s the gas station, which is fun to a point, but my breaking point with that line of work came when I realized that most of my shift was spent selling not gas and bakery and candy bars but cigarettes and lottery tickets. My “rock bottom” –other than the 13 hour shift I worked when a co-worker failed to show up– was selling four packs of Kools to an older woman who walked in dragging her oxygen tank behind her. I felt like an enabler, and it definitely reframed my sense of importance to the community in my work. But… it’s a job. Time will tell what the kids wind up doing this summer. If it’s only getting their licenses and building an Etsy shop that’ll keep going from school, I’ll consider that a win. Still, the girls need money for college, so this year, the pressure will be increased for them to find something (anything), even if it means a regular trip into Sioux Falls to work doing retail or Starbucks or something.
So, there’s the update. Hopefully the depth of my blog posts will increase as I work through getting this next project in my head out onto the pages. If you live in a little town that’s still got a grocery, here’s my encouragement to spend the extra five or ten bucks if you have it to keep it around. You’re probably spending that on gas anyway when you buy your groceries at the Walmart 20 miles down the road, so consider it a wash and do something good for your community.
