Emblem, tiny community
My husband and I lived in towns and cities throughout our marriage, until we moved to Emblem, Wyoming, 30 miles from my hometown. It was 2003; the Emblem population sign said “10”. It lied. We rented a house one city block’s distance from the post office and the irrigation office. There was an old school building, not in use, with a separate gymnasium building, still usable for basketball and public meetings. We were one of three homes within that block. I introduced myself to the other residents; one was a single man who surrounded his home with cow pens. Once a year he rounded up all his cows and their calves from the open range. For a few days we’d hear constant mournful mooing as the cows were separated from their calves. The calves traveled by truck to feedlots; the cows disappeared into pastures somewhere.
I persistently knocked at the door of the other house, until someone responded. They talked with me, and we exchanged emails. It was a woman and another adult. She gave me a delicious recipe for zucchini bars that included chocolate and butterscotch chips. However, she really did not want to socialize, and after a month, she quietly told me so.
My husband was a student at first; then he went to Iraq for a year with the military. I was lonely; I walked to the post office and to the irrigation office every few days. The postmaster, a woman, kept chickens. Periodically I bought eggs from her. She was willing to chat briefly, but she had work to do and didn’t want to talk to me. From the way she greeted people who had lived there for years, I gathered that I wasn’t part of her circle. Which was fair; I had just arrived and we had very little in common. I was expecting my sixth child, caring for five children under 13 years old. I was not a farmer and didn’t understand the terms they used or the issues they discussed.
The woman who ran the irrigation office, on the other hand, was quite willing to sit and talk with me for close to an hour at a time, when she wasn’t busy. She was friendly and interested in telling me how she was doing; she listened to what I said. When we moved away, she said she might come visit in Wisconsin. I agreed half-heartedly; she was friendly but didn’t have much in common with me, either, for different reasons. She drank alcohol frequently for fun; I did not ever drink. She had time and energy to go to bars and parties; I did not.
When we had lived there for a year, someone rented a house across the highway from the post office. This woman welcomed me and my children to talk and greet her animals. She had horses and donkeys. When my landlady’s workers cut the tall grass in our orchard, I offered the grass to this woman. She brought over a trailer and my older children and I raked it up and put it in. She had my older children visit to care for the animals. We liked her a lot.
The town had been a thriving German Lutheran community a hundred years ago; there was a church and several families within a couple miles still. I visited their women’s club, which met in someone’s home. They were very nice people, informative and helpful. At the time I was in my 30s; the average age was almost twice that. I frequently met people who knew my parents, since both my parents had grown up in a small (larger) town six miles away. But knowing my parents didn’t mean including me in events. I took my children to church activities in the nearby larger small town, and that was it.
This is the same place that we had so much help and support while my husband was gone; the help and support came from church members in the larger small town, relatives of my parents, and friends we met at church. My two eldest sons were in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts at the church; my eldest daughter went to church young women activities. We were homeschooling when we moved there, so I looked for homeschool activities. We found a couple, but there were almost no homeschool families nearby. We attended the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the dominant culture in the area. The homeschool families that were not members of that church were standoffish. I did make friends, primarily with other people who had moved in later, like us.
