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She spreads out her coloring supplies on the table. “I’m making a picture for you to take to work, Mommy.”
“Thank you! I’ll put it at my desk, so I can look at it all day and think of you and Daddy at home.”
I feel good about leaving them here, in this little cottage in the woods. They’re safe and cozy, and they have the woods out back to explore. I take Morgen’s picture and the lunch Scott packed for me, and I go start up the jeep. They wave from the window as I drive away.
No one’s around when I arrive at the radio station’s office, so I stand and wait, and wait, and wander around the office, looking at pictures and paraphernalia scattered about. There are antique record players atop file cabinets, pictures of festivals, and paintings of musicians. Then the door opens and Joan appears, a huge smile on her face.
“You’re here!” she says.
She shows me my desk and the files in the folders and how to access the database. She says she’ll give me a while to browse around and look things over, and then she can answer questions and give me some training on specifics.
My training, I find out, is a mixture of sorting through piles of information and tasks, trying to train myself on station procedures and regulations, and driving around with Joan to meet dozens of people, from the station’s volunteers to business sponsors to individual members.
I have no idea how I’m going to remember everyone’s name, and after the thirtieth person or so, I stop trying. I shake their hands and smile and say, “nice to meet you!” and think to myself that I’ll remember their name the next time we meet. They ask me where I’m from, I ask them where they’re from, and we exchange stories about why we moved here. Only a few of the people I meet are actually from Grand Marais. Most have moved here at some point over the past twenty years, and almost all of them moved up from Minneapolis. I actually joke with someone that it’s like a Little Minneapolis here.
“Yup,” he says, “we all come up on vacation and don’t want to leave. But,” he adds, “it’s only the lucky few who can actually call this place home.”
Then I guess we’re some of the lucky ones. I don’t know how much luck had to do with it, though. It seems to me that it was a lot of sacrifice and hard choices that brought us to this point, not luck.
Scott and Morgen are waiting for me when I get home. They present me with a vase filled with wildflowers they picked on their walk.
“We had a great day,” Scott says. “We explored the back woods and unpacked the rest of the boxes. See?” He opens the kitchen cupboards and shows off the organized shelves.
“Good job you guys,” I tell them. “I love how few things we have now. It all fits in this little house.”
“Yeah, we used to have three times as much space.”
“And ten times as much stuff!”
We laugh and sit down at the table to color with Morgen. She’s drawing some of the animals that might live in the forest around the cabin. I draw trees. Scott draws himself and Morgen on a walk.
“Tomorrow we want to explore the town a bit,” Scott says. “We’re going to drive you to work and keep the jeep.”
“Yes! Definitely. Go explore. Check out the library. This is our new home, so get to know it.”
Over the next couple weeks, Scott and Morgen drop me off and pick me up every day. While I’m at work they go to the library and the beach, the playgrounds and the whole foods co-op. When they pick me up, Morgen’s filled with stories to tell about the nice lady at the library, the seagulls at the beach, and the sucker she got at the co-op. She’s all smiles, and she looks forward to each day with her dad.
“It’s the perfect community, “Scott says after a few days. It’s small enough that everyone knows each other. And it has everything we need: a library, grocery stores, good school.”
“We’ll still have to go to Duluth to shop and stuff. There’s not much selection here.”
“Just go to the Ben Franklin,” he says. “They have kitchen stuff, toys, clothes. If they don’t have it here, we don’t need it. Seriously. There’s no reason to ever leave the community.”
On the weekends, they show me some of the places they discovered during the week. Mostly, though, I let them do the exploring, and I learn about the area through their stories.
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