Friday, June 5, 2009

Dispatch from the New Zone

It's amazing how quickly we moved into our new home in southeast Lansing, Michigan. Not only did we have a whole crew of folks from the church helping us, but after moving seven times in three and a half years, Tom and I have it down to a science. I've said this before, but the people who invented those foldable file boxes with handles should be sainted, or at least in the running with Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the Pope. Saint Chad of Milwaukee or something. Whoever you are, God BLESS you, dude.

So, with a little time on my hands before we leave for vacation, I polished off Kathleen Norris' Dakota, which seems appropriate somehow as I move into a subdivision on the edge of farm country. This afternoon I biked nine miles almost without meaning to: the land is perfectly flat, the roads are quilted north-south and east-west in mile-long blocks, and because it's impossible to get lost, you keep going. You cruise along, checking out the fields and wetlands and geranium-bejewelled farmhouses, and before you know it you've biked to the next town. Norris writes, "Living in a town so small that, as one friend puts it, the poets and ministers have to hang out together has its advantages" (105).

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