{So Long Small Town Life!}

I am sooooooooooo happy to be able to finally, officially and proudly say those words!  I am not a small town girl, never have been and never will be!   It was only supposed to be TOPS two years in StinkyTown, but we loved our house (CornHole) and stuck it out as long as we could (school is cheap there too! yay for Masters’). 

As much as I tried, I never got the small town mentality.  People never wanting to leave, even though the town is dead.  Layoffs, horrible smells (dog food factory, chicken farms and manure processing plants), huge sinkholes, floods, very poor city management, druggies, entitlement issues, no culture… 

The other thing I never got was the insatiable need of the women to gossip.  OMG, it was bad.  And it caught me in the end.  Not in the *I* was gossiping bit, but that people were gossiping about us.

Would you like me to elaborate?  Great!

There is a family that we’ll call the Walrus family.  Not a particularly nice bunch.  They say things nice to you, but in the same breath will say the opposite to someone else should they need something.  Not a big thing in the grand scheme of things, but enough that we chose not to be part of that circle.  Well, on my last day there, I was cornered by the Walrus family.  I was polite and friendly, but was really taken aback when they told me all of the issues we’ve been having as of late.  Things like how much we got hit on the sale of our CornHole house (as in they knew the EXACT amount), how long Xiris and I had been apart, where we bought WindyDreams, the circumstances of that purchase and the drama involved, and a whole bunch of other information I would never, ever had shared with them even if I did like them!  Oddly, they mentioned that they got all that information from another family that lives somewhere else (we’ll call them the Nucky family).  The Nucky’s used to live in CornHole, and were another family I did not get involved with more than required because the wife was so mean at gatherings, always talking about the people who weren’t there, most of it rumors.  I’m not sure why MrsNucky would want to keep track of people back in StinkyTown, especially one that has said probably about 6 words to her.  Anyway, I’m pretty sure of the direction that information GrapeVine travels, and it just means I have to further censor what I say to people.  Again, it’s not a huge deal – just enough of one to make this super private family take issue. 

In the end, I will be living in a place where I will make my own friends, not just becoming friends with Xiris’ coworkers (or their wives).  I already miss my one friend I made back in StinkyTown, and she knows it!  (HI CVG!!!!).

And, I know you are going to ask.  Yes, we egged the sign on the way out of town.  I think we earned it.  And, no, I don’t feel bad about it in the least.  And, yes it was fun!