I'm Just a Small Town Girl

Our journey to get to River Falls was a long one.

Lucas and I both grew up in rural Iowa on farms and we were accustomed to wide open spaces, crops, and livestock. We were also used to small towns with no traffic jams and maybe a stoplight or two if you were lucky.

There were some definite downfalls to living in an area such as this. The big one was that you would have to drive about 25 minutes or 25 miles (again no traffic to slow you down) to get to a major city to do any shopping.

While there were some downfalls there were some definite positives. Everyone knew everyone by name, you could count on anyone to help you out. Our parents didn’t need to worry about us when we went outside by ourselves. There was abundant land to use our imaginations and get dirty. And, we learned how to work hard.

When we graduated from college we moved to California as that was where Lucas was stationed with the Air Force. I loved all that there was to do in Northern California, but I hated living in the city. We lived there for 3 years until he got out of the Air Force and we moved to Woodbury, Minnesota.

This time it was a suburb and I thought it would be good for us, but I wasn’t happy. I didn’t like having neighbors and felt a bit claustrophobic. We lived there for 3 years.

Our next move took us to Afton, Minnesota where we purchased 9 acres in a rural residential area. I joked that I needed to be about 10 minutes from a Target and this fit the bill. We built our dream house and Elijah was born there. I thought the increase in land and space would be the answer, but something still wasn’t quite right.

We made the decision to look further out and set our eyes on River Falls in the country. It took a bit to find what we wanted, but found the perfect piece of land and house. We’ve been here for 4 years and couldn’t be happier. We love River Falls and the small town feel it provides. We love that Elijah can go outside and I don’t have to worry about him.

I always say that if we had moved from California to here it would have never worked, and that we needed to go through the journey we did to find our perfect place.

Life is a journey, sometimes complicated and messy. Embrace and learn to enjoy every single piece of it.