Small Town Living
Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny, is a book made to restore one’s faith in humanity. A synopsis: Jane moves to the tiny town of Boyne City to teach second grade and immediately begins dating Duncan, a local woodworker who has slept with almost every woman in the area. Jane can’t handle running into his former girlfriends all over the small town, but then an accident rejoins her life with Duncan’s, and all their futures are irrevocably changed.
I bought this book partly on the way the premise reflected the claustrophobia of small town life. I grew up on a farm in a community you technically could find on a really detailed state map, but it only had a church and a school and a tiny grocery/general store, all surrounded by farmland and scattered houses. The high school was twenty minutes away; places like Kroger, shopping malls, and the largest collection of chain restaurants were closer to an hour away. It was the delight of my young life when my parents wanted to eat out on a Friday night and we went to someplace thrilling like Wendy’s.
I truly loved growing up where I did, but as I reached high school, I dreamed of getting out and getting away. I had been with some of the same people from kindergarten (which my mom taught) through senior English (where many of them were taught by my dad), and I felt trapped by the person I had been at seven and ten and thirteen. I didn’t feel like anybody would ever let me be anyone besides that kid. I didn’t know who I wanted to be, exactly, but I didn’t feel like I had any freedom to choose.
By the time I left, after college and with two brand new sparkly rings on my hand, so many changes had taken place in the little community. The church, which I had attended for my entire life, had a new sanctuary, and my parents would soon be in the process of leaving it. The sweet little grocery/general store, where I had spent hours poring over the candy counter to make my decisions when Mom had to run out for a gallon of milk, was gone, and the school had built a new, modern school down the road, leaving the old structure slowly collapsing. Most of the changes were on the edges of my radar, as I had spent four years at college focused on what came next and on imagining a future that was anywhere else.
Yet before my husband could finish his degree in our new city several hours away, my little sister died. I came home to the moving sight of an entire town present at the funeral home for her visitation. The line grew around the building, and my parents didn’t sit down for six hours. My sister’s senior class, many of whom had also had my mom for kindergarten, wrapped themselves around my mom and sobbed, and when their own mothers tried to pull them away, my mom just shook her head and held them. My parents’ colleagues and principals, my dad’s students, our whole church, people we knew from clubs and Wal-Mart, my old classmates and teachers--everybody passed through that room.
The reasons we moved back at the end of that school year are a story for another time. But two months after what would have been my sister’s graduation, we got brand new jobs and a house near my old town. I was nervous to see if I could hang on to all the things I was learning about myself as an adult. But as it turns out, I was immensely lucky. This place, this town, this community, in all its small glory--it’s magic.
Oh, sure, there are challenges, and sometimes I have to remind myself how to behave just as surely as my mom used to remind me in kindergarten. But one of the things my mom used to tell me that didn’t really sink in until I was grown was that home is where you can be most yourself. I thought she was talking about home as our actual house, where I could always count on being loved. I didn’t realize home could be so many people who know you better than you know yourself. Coming home brought me back to the people who showed me through their example how to be the person I wanted to be.
Early Morning Riser is, of course, its own story, and Jane’s experience with small town life is not mine. But small town experiences are universal, and those experiences shape the way Jane and I each see the world. My kids joke about how adults at school know them by their family. I know when I run into the closest gas station to grab a Diet Coke that half the workers behind the counter putting together sausage biscuits will be former students. Early in the morning, I drive past flat orange and yellow fields collared and cuffed by deep green and covered with a pale blue sky. Even for someone who is prone to wander, each of these things are gifts, and they are bricks in the foundation of my definition of home.
