Small Town USA

Edgewood, Iowa.  Population 923, according to the 2000 census.  It’s a quiet place, where kids ride their bikes in the streets, neighbors wave hello, and everybody seems to know everybody else.  Any life event – babies being born, high school graduations, weddings, funerals – seem to be shared or at least known by all.  In short, it is the almost polar opposite of the place where I grew up.  And it’s where I got to spend last weekend.

Holidays are hard for my wife and me to plan.  I hate to spend any meaningful holiday time away from my family, she feels the same, and at the same time, we both want to be able to enjoy the holidays together.  That makes for a quite complex set of criteria to meet, and no one will end up 100% happy.  Fortunately we’re both good at compromising, and in the 6 years the two of us have been together, I don’t think a holiday has gone by that’s left either one of us too upset.

The big ones, holiday-wise, are Thanksgiving and Christmas.  There’s just something magical about those two that no other time of the year can match.  For them, we work out a way to split our time between our respective families and each other.  But for the lesser holidays, it often comes down to logistics.  My wife’s hometown is a lot closer than mine to where we live, so it is often the default destination.  For those times when the holiday gets us an extra day off, like Memorial Day or Labor Day, we’ll make the trek back to the Chicago ‘burbs.

Easter is neither a hugely important holiday to me, nor does it come with a bonus day off, so it became an Edgewood holiday.  Don’t get me wrong, Easter is nice.  Coloring hard-boiled eggs, huge chocolate rabbits, and pastel colors everywhere are a lot of fun.  But aside from the religious side for those who partake, it just can’t measure up to the big two.  I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who claims Easter as their favorite holiday.  Not needing to split time between destinations, off to E-town we went.

The first sign you’re approaching Edgewood is literally a sign.  Edgewood is set a little ways off State Highway 13, and at some point in time that apparently bothered the locals.  So for those individuals cruising down the highway just looking for a pleasant town to visit, there is an enormous illuminated sign with the words “Edgewood 3 miles” and a giant green arrow guiding your way in.

Following the arrow’s guidance, you arrive at Edgewood proper.  This looks and feels like a prototypical small town, a Bedford Falls or Pleasantville brought to life.  There’s a hardware store, parking lot full of farmers’ dusty pickup trucks.  The small city park, its swingset and picnic shelter nestled beneath the “Edgewood” water tower.  A faded red brick building with peeling paint identifying the owner’s feed company.  There isn’t a single stoplight in town, just a hanging four-way flashing light.  Eternally blinking yellow toward the highway, and red in to town.

Downtown Edgewood is a main street right out of the past.  The hodgepodge of shops and services, the assortment of storefronts built in different decades and styles.  There’s just about everything you could need all in one place.  From grocery store to café, from gym to hair salon, it’s a true microcosm of our whole society.  At the end of the main street is my Mother-in-Law’s cafe, where we will spend the next few days.

There’s no need to detail every moment of the time spent, but for being just short of 48 hours, it seemed to fly right by.  A series of happy moments, all strung together by the thread of this small town.  The first night: sampling menu ideas for the café, a group of family and friends eat, sip wine and share laughs into the night.  The next day is spent visiting relatives.  First we see my wife’s grandmother in her cozy and inviting apartment.  Then it’s a trip into the surrounding country to see her father on his small plot of land in rural Edgewood.  Time almost stands still as we relax on the deck in the cool spring air, watching the world go by at the pace of the John Deere tractors that occasionally rumble by.

And then it’s Easter morning.  After waking up, we all chip in to help with the meal, doing what we can to help my Mother-in-Law as she calmly prepares food for the dozens who will soon be arriving.  They do arrive, and good-natured chaos breaks out.  Everyone brings a dish of some sort, which all need to be sorted and set out on the tables.  The room quickly becomes a din of voices, brothers and sisters, parents and children, cousins all greeting each other and laughing together.  Meanwhile the children yell and run and play.  Looking around amidst the commotion before during and after the brunch, there isn’t a face without a smile on it.

Eventually it is time for the family to head home, and we are left in the sudden quiet of the shop.  My wife and I, with her family, finally have some downtime, and we sit at the café booths to chat for a while.  With time to reflect, I think back through the hectic and quickly-passing weekend.  The schedule was far from my routine, the location was 200 miles from my home, and many of the people were ones I don’t know terribly well.  But simply being around the joy of the family, happy to be together for the holiday, I was able to share a little of that feeling.

We drive back home, exhausted, and knowing that the next day at work is going to be draining after such a busy two days.  But despite that, we both feel happiness that we traveled back.  Easter may not be much of a holiday, and there’s still no way it can match Thanksgiving or Christmas in the hierarchy of them all.  But spending time with family has its own special magic, regardless of the occasion.  And that’s the same in Edgewood, Iowa, the Chicago suburbs, or any place beyond.