What Part of the Country (or Which Country) Are You From?

I grew up in a friendly little town in northern Idaho. There were about 5,000 people, and life was pretty laid back. We never locked the house door, and my mom usually left the car keys in the ignition. I guess that there was probably some crime there; but it could not have been very much.
Kids were safe out on the streets until all hours of the night, and that is where we uually played at night because we could see better under the streetlights. The "10 o'clock whistle" told us when it was time to quit playing and go inside for the night.
On saturdays, it cost 35 cents to go to the theater and watch the afternoon matinee, and you could stay and see it over if you wanted to sit that long.
On Halloween, they always had a special scary movie for the kids to go to after we finished up traversing the town with our grocery bags and collecting candy, apples, and an occasional home made cookie. Sometimes, we had to sing a song to get that cookie; but it was worth it.
No one had ever had anything bad happen to them while out trick-or-treating at that time, and the older kids watched after the younger ones; so we all had a good time.
Sandpoint was on beautiful Lake Pend O'reille, and the summer was usually spent at the beach by most of the kids. I (of course) was usually out riding my horse.
It was a great place to grow up in, and I had no idea how lucky I was until I did grow up, and lived in many other places.

 

I grew up about a mile and a half from a small unincorporated town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The population of the township that it was in was less than three hundred, and I was related to nearly everyone I knew through the eighth grade, and have since learned that I was related to a few of the people who I thought I wasn't related to at the time. My road was about three miles long and there were six houses on the road, since most people farmed and lived on large tracts of land.

There was a house right across the road from me, where an elderly couple lived. They had the same last name and were related to me but I never did figure what the relationship was. Their granddaughter was the same age as me exactly, as we were born on the same day, and we called ourselves cousins, although I know we weren't first cousins. Her mother was a missionary to Mexico though, so I saw her only in the summer months when her mother would visit her parents.

Just up the hill from us, on the other side of the road, was the church that we attended, the Bethel Covenant Church, which was an Evangelical Covenant Swedish denomination. Although we were in church whenever there was a service or program going on there, I never really understood what it was that we believed because a lot of it seemed contradictory to me. I learned later that this was because we had never had an Evangelical Covenant pastor. The church was never locked, and I don't think we even had a key to our house. Car keys were always left in the ignition where they belonged.

Because the church was always open, I would go there late at night sometimes and read pretty much everything in the library, which were mostly Bible resources, but there were plenty of novels too. Foxes Book of Martyrs was my favorite. Later, I would run the bulletins on Saturday nights, in preparation for the Sunday service, cranking them out on the church's mimeograph machine in the basement. Late at night, it was very spooky in the church. Often, I would think that I could hear someone walking around upstairs or, if I was upstairs, I might hear someone in the basement.

Across the road, and south of our house, out in the woods, was the original townsite, which had burned the same summer as the Great Chicago Fire. When people rebuilt, they rebuilt a couple of miles away, where the main line of the railroad had gone through, as well as the state highway. Abandoned and, by the time I came around, in the middle of a woods, there were the foundations of houses, parts of a few walls standing, and a portion of track from a railroad spur that had apparently once come through town. In some bushes, we found a railroad handcar. Since everyone's orchards had gone wild, that was a magical place to play as a child. There were wild apple trees, cherry trees, pear trees, and even grapevines. When we build shacks in the woods, we could build them on a foundation.

 

Oh, that's scary. Several years after I moved from Michigan, they had the first murder that had occurred in the county in more than fifty years. A teacher killed one of his students.

 

Diane was just asking Ken about statistics on which countries we had people from; and I was going to start a thread for that. Then I discovered that we had one hiding out down here in this sub-forum; so I am bumping it back up again. We have had a whole lot of new arrivals since this thread was last active, so it will be a great place for everyone to just share at least the country where you are from, and maybe where you live now, and whatever other interesting things you have to say about either of those places.

I have already mentioned that I was raised in northern Idaho; but want to add that I am now living in northern Alabama; so that I can live closer to where my daughter (Robin) is at. There are many wonderful things about the South that I have learned to love, not the least of which is Sweet Potato Pie.

 

Maine, United States