Short and sweet good-byes are not my style, apparently.
I closed out my newspaper column with a two-part love letter to the county we'll be leaving in less than a week. Here's part one:
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| The view from our front door {obviously not recently} |
This is a really difficult column to write. It’s my penultimate offering to you, the readers of the Wisner News-Chronicle, before my family and I move to Lincoln at the end of this month.
The decision to move has been a long time coming, and is bittersweet. The bitter I’ll get to in a minute, but the sweet will be finally living close enough to our families to call them neighbors.
If you’ve read “On the Lighter Side” for any length of time, you’ll know my family and Jim’s are extremely important to us.
When it was just the two of us, it was enough to see them on holidays and the occasional family gathering. After Evangeline was born, it got harder to say good-bye after visits. And after Brielle’s birth this May, we found ourselves spending every weekend this summer down south.
With our move, we’ll complete a set: All of my grandmother’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be living in Lincoln. My mother will be a 45-minute drive down I-80 and Jim’s parents live just an hour’s drive south in Kansas.
Though my girls don’t know it yet, it’s a tremendous gift we’re giving them to grow up with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins nearby.
But that gift doesn’t come without a price, which of course is that we’ll be leaving the friends who have become like family over the past four years.
So, as a parting gift to my readers, I’d like to close out my time here with a two-part love letter to Cuming County, and especially Wisner, the place where our family began.
The decision to move has been a long time coming, and is bittersweet. The bitter I’ll get to in a minute, but the sweet will be finally living close enough to our families to call them neighbors.
If you’ve read “On the Lighter Side” for any length of time, you’ll know my family and Jim’s are extremely important to us.
When it was just the two of us, it was enough to see them on holidays and the occasional family gathering. After Evangeline was born, it got harder to say good-bye after visits. And after Brielle’s birth this May, we found ourselves spending every weekend this summer down south.
With our move, we’ll complete a set: All of my grandmother’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be living in Lincoln. My mother will be a 45-minute drive down I-80 and Jim’s parents live just an hour’s drive south in Kansas.
Though my girls don’t know it yet, it’s a tremendous gift we’re giving them to grow up with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins nearby.
But that gift doesn’t come without a price, which of course is that we’ll be leaving the friends who have become like family over the past four years.
So, as a parting gift to my readers, I’d like to close out my time here with a two-part love letter to Cuming County, and especially Wisner, the place where our family began.
Dear Cuming County:
We moved here in July 2008. It was an oppressively hot day when we pulled up outside of the little house that would become our home. I’d never set foot in it before; Jim had arranged for it while I was still working in Oklahoma.
But I loved it right away, just like it didn’t take me long to fall in love with you.
Within a month, I was working at the Wisner News-Chronicle. If there is a better way to learn about a new community than working at its newspaper, I’d like to hear it. It was through my work at the paper that I learned who is related to who, who used to live where, who graduated in what year and with whom.
It didn’t take long to recognize people, and so consequently, I knew a lot more of your people than maybe they realized. It sometimes made me feel a little stalkerish, but also it made me feel at home to see familiar faces.
I love shopping at stores where you know the majority of the other shoppers. I love being on a first-name basis with local librarians. I love bowling with women who don’t hold my 97-pin average against me.
Where else could I have found not one, but two, excellent childcare providers for my children? Where else could I have joined in organizations dedicated to promoting the arts in rural Nebraska, even as an outsider — and a young one, at that? Where else could I have written a self-involved weekly newspaper column without recrimination?
There’s nowhere quite like Cuming County, and nowhere quite like Wisner. We won’t forget you.
Until next week,
Violet
We moved here in July 2008. It was an oppressively hot day when we pulled up outside of the little house that would become our home. I’d never set foot in it before; Jim had arranged for it while I was still working in Oklahoma.
But I loved it right away, just like it didn’t take me long to fall in love with you.
Within a month, I was working at the Wisner News-Chronicle. If there is a better way to learn about a new community than working at its newspaper, I’d like to hear it. It was through my work at the paper that I learned who is related to who, who used to live where, who graduated in what year and with whom.
It didn’t take long to recognize people, and so consequently, I knew a lot more of your people than maybe they realized. It sometimes made me feel a little stalkerish, but also it made me feel at home to see familiar faces.
I love shopping at stores where you know the majority of the other shoppers. I love being on a first-name basis with local librarians. I love bowling with women who don’t hold my 97-pin average against me.
Where else could I have found not one, but two, excellent childcare providers for my children? Where else could I have joined in organizations dedicated to promoting the arts in rural Nebraska, even as an outsider — and a young one, at that? Where else could I have written a self-involved weekly newspaper column without recrimination?
There’s nowhere quite like Cuming County, and nowhere quite like Wisner. We won’t forget you.
Until next week,
Violet
On the Lighter Side
Published Aug. 8, 2012
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