Some parts of the country are more open to outsiders and transplants than others, but most places have those little hidden secrets that are meant to reward the locals. You know, perks that are for “locals only.” When you move to an area that is accustomed to very little turnover (I regularly come across people who are 4th generation “middle-of-nowhere-Idaho”) and is particularly hostile toward the invasion of high-brow Californians (people who drive hybrids and use cloth shopping bags) this aspect of “locals only” becomes a bit more pronounced.
We’re no longer talking about a favorite watering hole or a lesser-traveled hiking trail (although there are plenty of those around these parts). The wife and I have a favorite example of “locals only” that we experienced months after moving to our blissfully unwelcoming little city here in Idaho. It’s what we refer to as the Locals Only Parade. And I’m not using that expression figuratively. It’s an actual parade.
On a Saturday morning during our first spring here, we were working in the yard. The weather was perfect. It was late May, and the early garden crops were flourishing in our brand new garden plot. I was probably adding some edging or tamping down dandelions (or more likely pretending to help the wife perform said tasks) when I noticed several pedestrians carrying lawn chairs. That struck me as a bit out of the norm but nothing sinister. Then an SUV parked across the street and proceeded to unload a family laden with camp chairs. They were a bit frazzled as if most of the family had been subject to a last minute diaper blowout just as they had started to back out of the drive.
This time I put down my work long enough to watch the family scurry down the street perpendicular to ours. Three blocks away, there was definitely a hubbub unfolding. “Hey, Babe,” I hailed the wife. “What does that look like to you?”
“What the…” she hesitated before answering, “looks like a parade.”
I nod my head. “It’s a frickin’ parade. Where are the boys?”
After my wife informed me that I had been tasked with watching the boys, I quickly remembered where they were and procure them. The four of us hustled down the street to watch the second half of the “Insiders Only Parade” meander past.
The parade route passed within three blocks of our house, and yet we hadn’t seen or heard anything about it. When we asked our neighbors about the parade, they simply replied, “Oh yeah, that happens every year at this time.” When I prodded them further about the unannounced nature of the event their response was, “I guess everyone just sorta knows about it.”
I left my obvious response to that unsaid. I guess the wife and I knew about it now. After that we worked doubly hard to identify other outsiders in our newly established orbit in order to extend them a welcoming smile and an explanation of the local lingo as we deciphered it. It’s not that most folk around these parts are intentionally unwelcoming. But when you’ve lived in the same place your whole life, you just don’t realize that other people haven’t, and that doesn’t make those people any less deserving.
This is the longest the wife and I have managed to stay in one place. Are we carpetbaggers? Gypsies? Perhaps. But that means we are equally likely to bring magical widgets to the locals as we are to reap financial ruin. There’s at least a fifty-fifty chance we make a positive contribution due to our extensive travels. I’m just saying outsiders are not always harbingers of doom. Sometime they are just locals from some place else.
At the Desk This Week
No desk working. I did manage to get away for an anniversary trip with the wife for the first time in several years. Not that it was our first anniversary in several years. It was our first celebration of our anniversary in several years. We’ve been married for twenty-three years. Crazy. We’ve almost been married for longer than I’ve lived without her. How is that for mind-blowing? I won’t lie, some of the years were terrible. Downright teeth-clenching, white-knuckling, gut-wrenching difficult. At least once I didn’t think I could keep ding it. But this last year has been genuinely blissful. So easily worth all the hard times, I don’t even have to pretend to do the math. I’m loving every minute and looking forward to how ever many I have left.
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