I grew up in a 3-bedroom, 1.5-bath old house on Michigan Avenue in Saline, Mich., where a patchwork of new subdivisions encroached on good old farming territory. It's just a 45- to 60-minute commute from the major automotive employers in Detroit and Dearborn and a 15-minute drive from Ann Arbor.

It was a nice house, lots of hardwood inside. Across the street was the gas station where a dog collected cash and credit cards at the pump, and a block away was a historic-looking mansion that took up a whole block and was doomed (through someone's will, I think) to be repainted the same greenish color for eternity. When I was 12 or so, I delivered newspapers throughout the neighborhood to pay for horseback-riding lessons and holed up in my bedroom reading for hours. I kind of wanted to BE Anne of Green Gables.

The house wasn't exactly energy efficient. My hamster once went into hibernation when I pushed its cage too close to a drafty window. My mom assumed it was dead and tossed it in the garbage; the little guy warmed up, snapped out of it, and bit my brother when he discovered it after school. We called the detached garage a barn because, well, it looked like a barn, complete with wooden doors that swung out. The upstairs bathroom toilet had no tank on the back; instead, the tank was in the basement. I don't really understand how that worked, but sometimes the water pressure or SOMETHING got off kilter and water shot out of the toilet.

With all its 1920s-era quirks (and a rabbit, several hamsters, fish, and a mixed-breed dog named after the Dow Jones Industrial Average), the house was still big enough to shelter all the insecurities and self-loathing of a teenaged girl who secretly - and sometimes not-so-secretly - thought she was never good enough. There, three siblings fought over whose turn it was to use AOL to connect to the Internet. Our parents paid for the Internet by the minute. We shared one computer. And one phone line. Cellular phones weren't accessories for teenagers yet, but I definitely remember marveling at three-way calling and call waiting. Can't remember if we had caller ID; we did have a fax machine, though.

Now, (I think) my house houses some sort of business accounting group, whose owners ripped out my mother's gardens to make room for a parking lot. But they saved the barn. I vaguely remember standing outside the house a few years after my parents moved away, staring at how different everything was and feeling something indescribable between annoyed and irate. Someone (I don't remember who) mentioned that the secretaries who worked there got freaked out because they thought they heard noises coming from the basement, where a concrete cistern collected rainwater.

We used the cistern water to water outdoor plants. There was a time I figured the cistern would be a good place to hide a dead body or two, so I could see how housewives-turned-secretaries could get the heebie-jeebies. But I figured anyone loosely associated with the people WHO PAVED OVER MY BACKYARD deserved an eerie feeling every now and then. Those voices would be the SOUNDS OF MY LOST CHILDHOOD, folks. (In reality, noise likely carried through the large heating vents in an old house that was never updated. But really.)

I've hung my pictures and clothes in several cities since then, many which left enduring marks on my personality. But that house housed me back before I really knew anything and was eager for everything new.

That was back before I knew small towns operated under false (but entrenched) perceptions. Back when I loved the smell of ink as the press printed the Saline Reporter just hours after we slapped the stories on the page using a wax machine and roller. Back when I wrote poetry in honor of coworkers' birthdays and unabashedly gave it to them. And crushed on guys who never seemed to crush on me back. (OH! And a girl was run over by a tractor in my high school parking lot on Take Your Tractor to School Day. She recovered, but seriously, my high school had Take Your Tractor to School Day.)

I haven't been to Saline in years. They built a mammoth new high school a few years after I graduated, and now my high school is the middle school. And somehow I doubt anyone drives tractors there. I'm sure nobody would know me from Adam, or remember the girl who angered old ladies by referencing Barenaked Ladies lyrics in the first sentence of a newspaper article. And I certainly haven't been tempted to use song lyrics as a lede in at least a decade. But Miranda Lambert's song kind of makes my mind wander...

My roommate got into Penelope Trunk's blog months ago, which led to me starting to read her a few weeks ago. (Yes, I usually am behind). Trunk has Asperger syndrome. She announced her miscarriage via Twitter (By announced, I mean she didn't think the miscarriage was a bad thing. It saved her the trouble of a planned abortion.) And she claims to write career advice but actually organizes funny personal anecdotes into lists and calls it a blog.1. Did you relocate away from family for a better job or another more interesting experience? (Yes = One point)

... to realize and acknowledge what this girl handled in a few short sentences. Bri was writing about her broken engagement, but I think the sentiments perfectly encapsulate my failed marriage.

At some point, we all learn that not everyone is who they hold themselves out to be, and there’s nothing like observing a person in his natural habitat to make you realize that love doesn’t necessarily transcend all.  Not everything translates well across the ocean, life has never been and will never be a fairytale, and there are some people you can’t help.  That’s when it’s time to take a deep breath and save yourself.

So, once upon a time, I knew a girl who longed for a boy who would read her e.e. cummings. And, for awhile, that made ME long for a boy who would read ME e.e. cummings.

When I was older, and more practicality than romance ran through my veins, I simply TOLD a boy who was on his way to making a serious commitment that I used to love the idea of reading e.e. cummings with a boy. No need to hint, right? What's hotter than a man who declared he would capitalize and punctuate when he damn well wanted to capitalized and punctuate?

It never happened.

This boy used to sing me country songs with a romantic flare, but no e.e. cummings. But does "Hey, good lookin'? What you got cookin'?" compare with:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,
my darling)i fear no fate
(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,
my true)and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Or with:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you
,i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh ... And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new


No, no, I think we can all see that it doesn't compare. And now, I'm afraid, the moment has almost passed...

I don't think I appreciated Hoopeston, Ill., as much as I should have when I was living there.

Don't get me wrong, Hoopeston is the first place I remember hearing the supposed adage - Small towns, small minds - and some of my experiences reinforced that when I was the editor of a small weekly paper there (circa 2003-2004).

An angry crowd gathered outside a city council meeting protesting Wiccans who wanted to open a "school" in town. A family wrote a letter to the editor complaining because their loved one didn't win a community award sponsored by the paper. One of the few African-American residents in town awoke one morning to find a burnt cross in his front yard.

It seemed like some people thought all (well, many of) my ideas were bad and would rather tell me about how things had always been than support a 22-year-old who was trying something new. I remember one woman commenting, "Gosh, you really don't know anything," (or something similar) when I asked for background on a building project. A seemingly friendly gentleman I met at the library suggested I read up on farming techniques so others didn't think I was some snotty college graduate who made a lot more money than they did.

(If you're wondering, I did pick up a few non-fiction, farming related books, but they did not influence any conversation I had with anyone the whole time I was there. Or ever, for that matter.)

In the defense of the townfolk, I did some bizarre things in the thrones of the culture shock that comes from moving from a college town to a small, relatively lower-middle-class farming community of 6,000. Like, I wore the cute, black boots I bought as souvenirs of a trip to Italy everywhere for the first two weeks until I got sick of the heels sinking into the grass. I started going to church but, when asked what I thought of the service, honestly answered that I found Christianity rather patriarchal. I also was taken aback by how many complete strangers tried to hug me at church.

But The Chronicle gave me the most freedom I've ever had on a job. For about a year, the weekly paper partially reflected my personality, from my love of using Impact font for headlines to scanning teenagers' art and publishing it in my version of a "lifestyle" section. I spent time talking with local high school journalism students and published some of the articles they wrote in class, which I believe my predecessor did as well. I helped another reporter write a two-part series on methamphetamine, which was a hot topic but a little more intense than what typically runs in a small weekly paper. I daydreamed about writing a book.

I tried to remember the "old me" as my parents and I ate corn at the Sweetcorn Festival yesterday. Within five seconds of parking, we witnessed a woman scream, perhaps on the edge of violence, at a boy who seemed about 11 or 12. But there were families fishing in the lagoon, National Sweetheart Pageant contestants signing autographs in the Civic Center, and people with aluminum pans standing in line for free corn.

When I lived in Hoopeston, I was SO clueless that I was clueless to the fact I was clueless. Er, almost.

But I also was passionate, hard-working, and rather ill-equipped to handle small-town journalism. I let typos slip into the paper, but I got to tour a factory for the first time, plant a few rows of beans while hanging out with a farmer for a morning, ride along with a police officer, and cover a fire that destroyed a whole block.

I just didn't really realize how much fun I was having while I was doing it.

Once upon a time, I so badly burned a batch of brownies-from-a-box-mix that my brothers, thinking themselves to be too funny, played Frisbee with them in the backyard. I don't exactly remember if the single brick of brownie broke when it hit the ground, but I wouldn't have been surprised if it didn't. I really burned those things.

My cooking is somewhat better now.

So much so that I was willing to tackle pastichio (a Greek lasagna and one of my mom's specialties) for a special dinner with Aaron. I got the recipe, asked for details on how exactly one "scalds" milk (I would have thought that was a bad thing) and set about cooking Friday evening.

Then the power went out. We killed time for an hour or so, but the power didn't return, so we tried to make the best of things. Aaron lit the gas burners for me with a candle-starter and held a flashlight while I made the cream sauce and layered the meat, cream sauce and pasta in a baking pan. We gave up on eating Friday night, largely because Aaron suspected the gas oven's temperature controls were electric.

Thankfully, the power came back on about 6:30 a.m. Saturday ,and I popped the pastichio in the oven while we watched Pirates of the Carri bean (pause to pay homage to Johnny Depp, if you need to.)

Anyway, the results were OK. Some found the cream sauce to be a little bland; I thought maybe I should have let it thickened more. From the single beam of the flashlight, it looked plenty thick to me after stirring it for two minutes, but the recipe called for 10 minutes. Maybe the recipe was right.

(Sigh.) I do make an excellent macaroni and cheese. Not bland, and plenty thick.

I was on my second or third date with my eventual ex-husband when one of the bigger stories of my 14-month tenure at The Chronicle (in Hoopeston, Ill.) flared. An entire city block in the neighboring town of Rossville caught fire, completely destroying storefronts and assorted apartments that were more than a century old. (If you've never heard of either town, they are about 45 minutes north of Danville, which sits along I-74 about 10 miles from the Indiana border.)

Firefighters from about 25 area departments collectively spent 12 hours trying to tame the fire and then babysat the rubble for another 21 hours to make sure the remaining hot spots didn't flare. When all was said and done, the fire took days to burn itself out.

The advantage to working for a weekly paper was that I had three or four days to write the story. The disadvantage was that my readers were small-town residents who surely had heard the best of the story before the paper came out. Oh, and did I mention, the "editorial staff" consisted of me, another full-time reporter, and two part-timers, one of whom was a high-school student?

So, after dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in Champaign, Joe and I headed for the fire scene, which was swarming with random citizens taking photographs because this was the biggest fire the area had seen since a Hoopeston factory burned for six days in Sept. 1992. The news that Joe and I were dating also broke that night, because, you know, showing up at a fire scene with someone of the opposite gender was a clear sign of romantic involvement. (The next day, the radio DJ from Hoopeston's country station grilled me for details at the local bowling alley/bar and ended up shaking Joe's hand to congratulate him on our budding relationship, which I have to admit I did not yet consider a relationship after three or so dates.)

Anyhoo, here's the anecdotal lede I came up with for that week's paper (Wednesday, March 3, 2004, issue):

Joel Bird had the nozzle. Rich Birch had the hose. Dave Hamilton had the thermal imaging camera.

The three Hoopeston firefighters with air packs on went in the front of the pizza parlor as the Rossville firefighters attacked the fire from the back. The call had gone out a little past 7 p.m. Friday that a fire had started at the rear of 112 S. Chicago Road.

At around 7:45 p.m., there was little to see from the front.

"All we saw was smoke," Birch said. "We couldn't go forward. We couldn't turn left. We couldn't go right."

Hamilton couldn't pick up any heat with the thermal imaging camera. Bird said he could feel heat on his neck, Birch said, and then a "big ball of fire" rolled toward them. A wall fell toward Bird. Birch was thrown off his feet and out the door. The windows exploded.

"I don't know how far I flew, but everyone outside said it looked pretty cool," Birch said.

Believe it or not, that anecdotal lede led to a job offer at a start-up paper in Crawfordsville, Ind. (What?!, you say, newspapers were once starting, rather than disbanding? True story.) I turned down the offer to go be a business reporter in Anderson, Ind., where I helped cover a fire at a magnesium recycling plant that forced thousands to evacuate.