A great post over at Gardens Don’t Launch, a sort of church-planting blog, on living in a small place. For the Christians who don’t live in New York or London.
My grandmother has the coolest name of anyone in America, guaranteed. Olena Sigurros Homfrieder Paulson Stager.
She’s probably also from the least cool place in America: Mountain, North Dakota. The population has never topped 220, and the size has never reached 0.15 square miles.
That is a provincial locale if there ever was one.
“Provincial”, of course, is usually a pejorative term. Backwater. Flyover country. Irrelevant.
I am reading a set of essays by someone who has been called provincial. He is also from North Dakota. As a novelist, Larry Woiwode lived for a time in New York City, but wrote about the North Dakota he felt connected to. Eventually he decided he needed to move back to North Dakota to learn whether the North Dakota he remembered, and the North Dakota that emerged in his fiction, was rooted in a semblance of facticity.
It was, and it wasn’t, as he says.
After living in New York, and in England, the most cosmopolitan Anglophone places on earth, ultimately his family re-settled in that provincial place.
There’s a fantastic Chesterton quote at the end.
