My little town

The adventure continues...

Today I am introducing a new subsection for my Substack. It’s going to focus on my recently (measured by the time horizons of rural American dynasties) adopted hometown.

First, let me explain how I ended up here and how it has turned into the happiest time of my life.

In the increasingly online, ungrounded, nomadic life we live in 21st century America, I had to find a new hometown.

In 2010, my domestic life imploded. In 1999 I left behind my farm in Indiana. I had managed to hold on to it through my mother’s decline and death, and the turmoil that roiled and eventually disintegrated the remaining family. (For the love of God — if your parents are involved in a tenancy-in-common and they are getting frail, make them straighten that shit out before it hits probate.) I left because my then husband — father to my younger daughter, step-father to my elder — wanted to attend law school in Minneapolis. At first I just rented the farmhouse out, but that turned into a financial and emotional headache of epic proportions. His graduation found me readier than ready to sell it to someone else and move on.

The sale financed a hefty down-payment on a property in Prince Georges Co, MD — a reasonable commuting distance from his new job as a junior associate at a white-shoe firm in downtown DC whose name you’d recognize. I was exhausted from the stress of having supported him and two minor children for ten years on nothing but my own earnings, and ready to retire to caring for my family and tending the property.

That lasted for six years. The husband grew restless, resentful, distant, and abusive. The legal economy soured. He was first demoted to 75% pay and then sacked. He responded by becoming verbally unresponsive and sitting in the parlor playing a ukulele for 14 hours a day. He also had an affair with a woman — with whom I had both friendly and professional dealings — and when that came to light demanded that I allow a continuation of the dalliance lest he become suicidal. I actually didn’t care what he did by this time and was just thankful when he was out of the house, but the paramour quickly tired of his neurotic neediness and gave him the boot. This made him even worse and the marriage swirled the bowl rapidly after that.

So, in 2010, I had to make a number of decisions. But one decision I was spared: whether to abandon Maryland and return to my home town. Because my home town had gone away.

Even before I left, the writing was on the wall. Westfield, Indiana was too close to Indianapolis, and Indianapolis was booming. After I moved back as an adult to try to save the family farm, the character of the place had already changed. Indianapolis was, when I was a kid, a manufacturing town surrounded by farms. Detroit Diesel Allison. Western Electric. Eli Lilly. But in the early ‘90s that all changed and Indianapolis became a center of banking, insurance, and publishing. And all those soft white collar cogs and their families needed soft white collar cookie cutter suburbs and prosperous modern public schools. And Westfield, with its cheap land, non-existent zoning, and easy access to US-31, was ripe for the taking.

The homestead where I was born, lived until I went away to college, and raised my young family from 1990 to 1999 — in a house built in 1875, on land my family had owned since the 1830s when the War of 1812 land grants were finally honored — was razed to build a luxury hotel. The fields where I tramped with my young kids to watch river otters and raccoons in the old flooded gravel pit are paved. The pond, now drained and filled in, hosts a Starbucks.

So, having been transplanted to Maryland and then abandoned to my own devices, I instead came out to the Eastern Shore.

Here there are the familiar vistas, crops, and rhythms of my youth — flat fields of corn, soybeans, milo, and winter wheat fenced with tree lines of cottonwood, beech, and ash. Indiana was more hogs than chickens, but honestly, manure all smells more or less the same. The long unlighted ribbons of two-lane county highways, where the etiquette of cars and farm machinery is unspoken but understood, connect us to other little towns, alike and yet each unique in some way.

What I wasn’t prepared for is all the seafood. Growing up in landlocked Indiana, I am pretty sure I’d never had fish that wasn’t fish sticks or Methodist Church fish fry until I was in my 20s. Here the Chesapeake tosses its bounty on shore with mad abandon. Crabs, oysters, catfish, stripers. We make a culinary game of invasive species. Snakehead fish? Zebra mussels? Here’s a great recipe!

So I found my second act here in Denton MD, Caroline’s county seat. Get a look at our goofy seal:

So, the courthouse tower, the tomatoes, corn, strawberries…that’s all true. This county has amazing fresh food. Probably the only thing that prevents us from being overrun, Colorado style, by coastal organic vegans, is the blatant in your face Trumpism. Maryland has eight House representatives and the one Republican in the bunch is our guy, Andy Harris. The county’s flagpoles are undergoing a period of haphazard transition, because vulgar “Brandon” variants have easily occupied the #2 spot for a few years and no obvious replacement has appeared.

Denton is a town of ~4000 inhabitants. There are of course outlying areas that aren’t incorporated, so don’t count in a census sense. Denton is also located at a strategic midpoint between the Bay Bridge and the high-class beach rentals and summer homes in Rehoboth and Bethany. This gives our liquor store, gas stations, and fast food outlets a competitive boost they might not otherwise enjoy. And brother do we milk that. Get off the bypass and spend a few hours here — soaking up our very fine single-sourced site-roasted coffee and hand crafted sourdough bagels, touring our historical sites featuring Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and visiting the Museum of Rural Life to get a flavor of how we used to eke a living out of inhabiting the bend in the river beyond which steamships could not venture. Unload it, boys! The rail cars will take it from here!

So I’ve been here for ten years. And the history of the place — just of my own house, never mind the town — could be a bottomless rabbit hole. But it’s my town now, and I want to have a relationship with its past, because my relationship with the place where I actually did have a past has been irrevocably severed.

So if you’re interested in this kind of thing, watch this space for future installments of Livin’ La Denton Loca.