Wannaskan Almanac for Tuesday, March 3, 2026 Small Town One

I have been playing around with short stories lately...ones about growing up near a small town.  Hopefully it will be okay to share a few of them with you.  This is what happens when you finish all your conferences on Wednesday and have all day Thursday to stare at your computer. Extremely rough draft but still readable.  Enjoy!

I didn’t grow up in a town. I grew up outside of a town... and that town was so small that people in that town didn’t consider it to be a town. The people in that "town" claimed to have grown up near a town that was about 25 miles away. It was a hierarchy of distance, a strange social ladder where the closer you were to a paved road with a yellow line down the middle, the higher your status.

Where I lived, the roads didn't have lines. They didn't even really have names, at least not names that appeared on any map. We called them things like "The Old Miller Run" or "The Creek Path," and if you were giving directions to a stranger—though strangers were rarer than hen’s teeth—you’d tell them to "turn left where the red barn used to be before the fire of ’98." If they didn't know about the fire, they didn't belong on our road.

The place that wasn’t a town was called Walnut Bend. I say "called" because there wasn’t a sign. There was just a spot where the gravel got a little thicker and the houses got a little closer together—close being a relative term. In Walnut Bend, "close" meant you could see the glow of your neighbor's porch light if the humidity was low and you stood on top of your tractor.

Walnut Bend consisted of a general store that sold three things: bait, gasoline, and milk that was usually three days past the expiration date. It also served as the post office, though the "postmaster" was really just a guy named Earl who kept the mail in a series of bread crates behind the counter. If you wanted your mail, you walked in, grabbed a soda, and asked Earl if the government had sent you anything.

But if you asked anyone in Walnut Bend where they were from, they wouldn't say Walnut Bend. They’d say they lived "out past Millersville." Millersville was the town 25 miles away. Millersville had a stoplight. It had a grocery store where the milk was cold and the floor was waxed. It had a library with books that didn't smell like woodsmoke. To us, Millersville was the shining city on the hill, even though people in the actual city—the one two hours away—thought Millersville was a backwater pit.

Life was measured in those 25 miles. Going "into town" wasn't a casual errand; it was an expedition. You didn't just go to Millersville because you ran out of eggs. You went to Millersville because you had a list three pages long, a full tank of gas, and a cooler in the trunk for the perishables.

My mother treated the trip like a military operation. We’d leave at 6:00 AM on a Saturday. We had to be back by noon because the heat of the afternoon would wilt the lettuce, and more importantly, because my mother believed that nothing good ever happened in a town after the sun hit its peak.

"Too many people," she’d mutter, staring at the three cars parked in front of the Millersville hardware store. "Everyone’s in a rush. No one looks where they’re going."

To her, three cars was a traffic jam. To me, it was a parade. I’d press my face against the truck window, staring at the people walking on sidewalks. Actual sidewalks. Concrete paths designed just for feet. In Walnut Bend, the only paths were made by cows or runoff from the spring rains.

One summer, when the dust was so thick you could taste the grit in your water, a silver car appeared on our road. This was an event. People in Walnut Bend didn't drive silver cars; they drove trucks the color of rust or SUVs the color of dried mud.

The car slowed to a crawl in front of our mailbox. I was sitting on the porch, trying to teach a stray dog how to shake hands. The driver rolled down his window. He looked like he’d stepped out of a movie—his shirt was white and crisp, and he wore glasses that didn't have any dirt on them.

"Excuse me," he said, sounding frantic. "I’m looking for the town of Walnut Bend."

I looked at him, then I looked at the dog. "You're in it," I said.

He looked around at the endless stretch of brown fields and the single, leaning silo in the distance. "No, the town. The center of town. I need a gas station or a hotel."

I pointed toward Earl’s general store, which was about two miles down the road. "Earl’s got a pump. No hotel. But if you keep going 25 miles, you’ll hit Millersville. They’ve got a Motel 6."

The man looked at his dashboard. "My GPS says I'm in a residential district."

I laughed, though I didn't mean to be mean. "Sir, the only 'residents' around here for the next mile are me, this dog, and about four hundred head of cattle. The GPS is just being polite."

He looked defeated. He’d come from the city, looking for a shortcut to the interstate, and the map had betrayed him. He thought a "town" meant a place with people. He didn't realize that in our part of the world, a town was just a state of mind—a way to describe a collection of ghosts and gravel.

Being a kid "outside of a town" meant you were a professional traveler. The school bus was my primary mode of transportation, and it was a yellow prison of endurance.

Because we lived so far out, I was the first one on the bus at 5:45 AM. I’d sit in the very back, watching the stars fade as the bus lumbered down the washboard roads, vibrating so hard my teeth felt loose. We’d spend two hours winding through the countryside, picking up kids and dust from every hollow and ridge, until we finally crossed the "border" into Millersville.

By the time we got to school, I felt like I’d already lived a full day. The "town kids"—the ones who lived in Millersville—would walk to school in five minutes, their hair perfectly combed, looking fresh. We, the "out-of-towners," arrived covered in a fine layer of bus dust, smelling faintly of diesel fumes and hay.

There was a divide in the cafeteria. The Millersville kids talked about the cinema and the new pizza place. We talked about whose tractor got stuck in the mud and how many coyotes we’d heard the night before. We were from the same county, but we lived in different centuries.

People ask me now if I hated it—if I felt lonely living in a place that people denied was even a place.

I tell them about the silence.

In a real town, there is no such thing as silence. There is always the hum of a street light, the distant roll of tires, the click of a neighbor’s gate. But outside of Walnut Bend, the silence was a physical thing. It was heavy and deep. On a winter night, after the snow had fallen and the wind had died down, you could hear your own heart beating. You could hear the woods "breathing" as the trees cracked in the cold.

That silence taught you how to think. It taught you that you didn't need a crowd to be a person. When you grow up in a place that isn't a town, you have to invent your own entertainment. You build forts in the brush; you learn which berries won't kill you; you learn how to fix things with baling wire and duct tape because "town" is 25 miles away and the hardware store closes at five.

When I graduated high school, the ceremony was held in the Millersville gymnasium. The principal stood up and talked about us "heading out into the world."

I remember looking at my friends from Walnut Bend. We were already in the world. We’d been navigating the world since we were old enough to walk through a pasture without getting stepped on.

Most of the Millersville kids stayed. They got jobs at the grocery store or the bank. They liked the comfort of the stoplight and the waxed floors. But the Walnut Bend kids? We scattered. Maybe it’s because we were already used to the distance. If you’re used to driving 25 miles just to get a decent loaf of bread, driving 500 miles to a new city doesn’t seem that scary.

A few years ago, I drove back. I wanted to see if Walnut Bend had finally become a town.

I drove past Millersville, which had grown. It had a Starbucks now, and a second stoplight. But as I turned onto the road toward Walnut Bend, the pavement disappeared. The gravel took over. The "Old Miller Run" was still there, though the red barn was now just a pile of grey lumber sinking into the earth.

I pulled up to Earl’s store. Earl was gone, replaced by a younger man who looked just as tired. I bought a soda and asked, "Is this Walnut Bend?"

The man looked at me, then looked out at the empty fields. "Walnut Bend? Never heard of it. We’re just out past Millersville."

I smiled. Some things never change. Walnut Bend wasn't on the map, and it probably never would be. It was still the invisible waiting room between the fields and the world, a place that didn't exist to anyone except the people who were proud to be from nowhere.

I got back in my car and headed toward the "real" town 25 miles away. I didn't need a GPS. I just followed the dust.