I grew up just outside Grunthal, so I’m used to living in (or near) a small town. As I get older, I don’t think I’d have it any other way. Small towns are beautiful – the image on this post is from the edge of town.

I’m not a relationship person the way some people are, I’m more introverted, and am task oriented… I do better with objects/machines than interacting with people; sometimes I can’t see the forest from the trees in situations that are easy for other people.

The reason I bring it up is because living in a small town you have a smaller circle but that means you can know them more intimately. From that perspective – Blumenort is a lot like Grunthal (but my heart will always be in my original home town). It’s where my grandparents and parents are buried. I was a wild child and was pretty much always in trouble, but in a small town we still looked out for each out, we had a heart for people… something that seems to be missing from society these days.

From one perspective I had the best childhood ever; as a kid, I could walk into Dairy Capital and order a pizza pop, crinkle cut french fries with Heinz, and get a grape soda/chocolate milk from the drink freezer in the back and put it on the tab, it was a true greasy spoon type of place and I loved it. In the back of the restaurant thru double doors was a back lounge type area with more seating and a table top arcade machine… what people didn’t know was if you switch it on and off enough times, the lives on the machine would glitch, a binary bit would flip and instead of have 00 lives (the default), you would have the maximum (99) and then I could play without a quarter until my dad said it was time to go back to the gravel pit and I’d have to drive the payloader for untold miles on the highway, or screen gravel for government testing and upload (aka fat finger… lol) the results to the PC that booted off of 5.25 inch floppy discs running DOS. I was just a 10 year old kid with a capabilities of a man, or so I thought.

I’d say I really didn’t become a man until I had to bury my parents. Something changes in a person when the mom and dad you used to rely on for everything is gone… one day you wake up and you’ve lost them; they aren’t there anymore and they never will be again. Every fight you ever had, every stupid thing you ever said to them, the things you couldn’t see eye to eye on – that is suddenly just so trivial. When I found out my mom had died, I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t inhale or exhale, I felt frozen and started to panic – I wasn’t sure for a second if I would ever breathe again. For a person so far removed from his emotions, it was one of the few moments in my life that the walls I put up came crashing down, and every feeling I had ever thrown down that dark well came rushing back up… it utterly overwhelmed me.

Suddenly I was back in control and I could breath but there was an uncanny realization that things would never be the same again and that chapter in the book of my life was permanently closed.

Now in this community; we make new memories and go to the local restaurant, the “Hometown grill”, we have a local church – the Blumenort Community Church, and we also have each other…

Blumenort is a place of memories, some that were, some that are, and some that are yet to be – and from that perspective – we can all be optimistic.

Jason