December Semi-Daily: where I live

[resonant]

kass, "What do you like best about where you live?"

I love the Driftless Zone, the hills and the bluffs, the wide flat fields with little streams making crazy curves through them.

Compared with central Illinois, here there's a noticeable additional season between summer and fall, which I think of as the harvest season. In about the second week of August, the worst of the summer heat (which is never all that bad) subsides, and the nights start getting chilly enough that you want long sleeves or another layer if you're going to be outside. I don't like summer, but I love fall, and essentially we get two separate falls.

And I like that the leaders of my city put a lot of effort and intelligence into it, in ways both large and small. Small: there's a small crew of people who are responsible for keeping the tiny downtown looking neat, so there are never piles of leaves in the gutters or spiderwebs in the windows. There are little vegetable patches planted in the yards of the city buildings; go to a commission meeting in the summer and you're liable to get sent home with an armload of kale.

And on a large level -- do you know what they do about high school dropouts here? They call them. The city is small enough that someone from the community college or the school administration can actually call them up and say, "Hey, what would it take to get you a diploma? What can we do to help?"

I mean, it's not paradise. It's mighty white (they have diversity! some of them are German and others are Irish!), and the citizens who aren't white are much more likely to live in poverty. Wages are stagnant while rents are rising. There's a problem with lead in rental housing. There's a problem (maybe not unrelated) with reading ability in the grade schools. And my employer came to town and hired a bunch of people and then laid off huge numbers of them five years later, so it wasn't the godsend the town expected.

But it's still nice to see intelligent people identifying problems and trying to solve them, instead of just throwing up their hands and saying, "It's OK if Main Street crumbles as long as taxes are low."





29 -- mecurtin, What is the most beautiful sight you see outside on a regular basis? Can be a building, landscape, plant, animal, artwork, people playing, whatever.
30 -- china_shop, "Your favourite book you read this year."
31 -- wolfshark, "what is your favorite story to reread of your own stuff? what was your favorite story to write?"

Comments

[kass]

Oh this is a lovely post; thank you for this.

[wanted_a_pony]

No lie, reading this gives me a bit of hope for American civilization. Thank you!

[monanotlisa]

"they have diversity! some of them are German and others are Irish!"

Heh.

I like the idea of wanting to help people in the community overall. I come from a place between small and medium-sized, but I've never really felt people would help much beyond their sub-community group, if you know what I mean.

[resonant]

I never really bonded with the old place, even after decades there, and somehow I just fell in love with this one.

[resonant]

It gives me hope, too! I joined a citizen advisory commission, and so my little group of people can actually say to our city staff representative, "Can we provide developers with some information about native plants for landscaping? Can we maybe even provide them with some financial incentive for using them?" and, like, the next time we see the minutes of a City Council meeting, they've actually done it!

[resonant]

The culture of our old town was very complainy -- like, "The schools here are going to hell, so that's why I moved my family to Morton."

Here, it's more like, "The schools here are going to hell, and that's why I'm running for Board of Education."