mmerriam | Back to Working on Dark Water Blues

The best thing about living in the hinterlands of out-state Minnesota was that, despite over two-hundred and fifty years of settlement, the people in rural Minnesota still held to certain traditions. In the case of Clinton, Minnesota, a little farm and ranch community of about five hundred or so people, one of those traditions was to mind your own damned business.

Descendant of Finns, Norwegians, Swedes and other taciturn folks, they did not ask questions, did not much care what you had been in the past, and figured that as long as you pulled your weight, that was the important thing. And if a man had been run out of the Cities, well, that was not exactly a black mark against him out here. And if people called him uncanny because he could conjure up a soaking rain to save a crop from time to time, or cure old man Jorgenson's cows of foul in the foot and rid your dog of worms, well, it was a useful kind of uncanny.

And if that man's wife was a four-foot seven-inch woman with black eyes and pointed teeth who sometime grew talons that could punch through a tractor tire, well, then they hoped he knew how to keep his woman happy, but it really was not any of their business what the couple got up to in private. The more so since she understood and talked to the little folk of the country, cajoling them into lending a helping hand for the traditional rewards of milk, bread, honey, and cider.