Small Town, Big Dancing

When I received the magazine entry (below) for our upcoming “Saying Yes!” magazine issue in my inbox on Saturday, I couldn’t help but smile (even though it came in too late to make the issue). Stacy Boe Miller was expressing her feelings for the little town that she and I and all of MaryJanesFarm call home. And while she was doing so, I was randomly mailing my mother-in-law earrings that Stacy had made and sharing her website with all of you! What are the odds, really? Well, pretty good in this wonderful little place called Moscow, Idaho.

Small Town, Big Dancing by Stacy Boe Miller of Moscow, Idaho …
When my new friend Julia called and asked me to a local concert, I almost didn’t say yes. My husband, three kids, and I had just moved to northern Idaho from Minneapolis, and though I was eager to make new friends, some days I just found all the meeting and greeting a little too tiring. I decided at the last minute to go, and through this one evening out, I learned a lot about the little town I was now calling home …

Though I had only lived in Moscow for three months, I knew several people who were there. There were moms I see at my kids’ school, a woman I had met the week before at a book club, a lady who has rung me up a few times who I met at the local food co-op, another woman who made the soap I bought for my mother-in-law recently, a colleague and friend of my husband, and oddly enough, a man I had just met two hours before. There were professors, students, farmers, painters (Julia was filling me in on those I didn’t know), kids, parents, and bread bakers. So, the fact that everyone knew each other is in part what struck me and what I realized I would have to get used to, but I think the thing that stuck out the most is that everyone was dancing.

It’s one thing to go dancing in a city where you might run into someone you know, but a whole different thing to dance with those people who you’ll see in the next couple of days at your kids’ school or every weekend at the farmers’ market. I hesitated. Julia actually called me a wallflower at one point, but only because I don’t know if I’m ready to shake my behind next to the person who will greet me at the checkout counter the next day.  I admire it though, and even more, I think I can really learn to live it.

Here is this town in Idaho, far away from anything I know, where the people eat together at the co-op, learn from and teach each other at the university, buy each other’s produce and handmade goods at the farmers’ market, and then on the weekends, come together and let the music move them. Hopefully, in no time, I will be out there like some of the others, along with my town-mates of all ages and professions, eyes closed, arms in the air, letting the music move me, and the next day I can smile at someone familiar and know the music moved them too.