News From the Lake

In my last months in Boston, when I told my friends that I was turning down the offers in Toronto and San Diego and taking a job in the midwest, Benjamin had the best response. After a long, last drag on the butt end of his cigarette, he gave me a big hug and a kiss on my cheek. "That's fabulous, sweetie. And I promise I'll still be your friend when you come back all earnest and fat."

A year later, I am still blessed with tiny stick arms and hummingbird-like metabolism. And I have managed to surround myself with bicoastal expat friends who all have the same sickly inappropriate sense of humor that I do. I live in the center part of town, one of what the locals sneeringly deride as "condo people", and I would very much like to believe that my life is still more This American Life than Prairie Home Companion.

And yet.

I go to the farmers market every Saturday morning and banter about the weather with the lady who sells hand-made soaps.

A coworker sees me on the street and invites me over for dinner because his wife, she's pulled in a mess of strawberries and now it's time for pies.

I go biking out past the suburbs on Sunday mornings along a trail that winds through fields full of sprouting cornstalks and swerve to avoid the chipmunks who like to dash across the pavement for fun.

I walk home in the evenings past a white-haired man playing lazy blues on a steel guitar who sings infrequently in a croaking whiskey and cigarettes baritone.

There are days I don't understand at all how I ended up here. My heartbeat is slowing to match the steady plodding thrum of the slow midwestern life I'm begun to lead, and I can't decide if it's my age or the oddly compelling charisma of this town that's causing the change. But oddest of all is how much I'm coming to like this place, where all the women are strong and the men good-looking and the children above average.

Life in Lake Wobegon won't be so bad.