Sometimes we forget to lock our back door. Brian goes out walking around our neighborhood at 11:00 at night. There’s no one sitting on the sidewalk downtown begging for spare change. There isn’t trash in the street or the smell of piss everywhere. The shopping carts at the store aren’t fitted with locks to prevent them from being stolen. You don’t see smashed auto glass on the sidewalks. You hear frogs, owls and coyotes instead of sirens or random screaming outside at night.

So I love living here. I miss parts of the big city — mainly the ability to get any kind of food I want at any time. But I have traded it for a peaceful existence.

It’s not perfect — I don’t live in some kind of paradise or a gated community (yuck) or anything like that. There are still assholes who drive their giant trucks too fast down our road, there will still be a thousand stupid illegal fireworks set off ALL NIGHT on the fourth of July, people still let their dogs wander around loose or chain them up in their yards all day to bark at everyone.

But I don’t mind living here in the sticks. I could walk fifteen minutes from my front door and see horses and cows standing in their pastures. My town has fewer than 10,000 residents, but we are just a 20-minute drive from the boat that takes us to Seattle. It kinds of balances on this fine line; just a couple more miles away and it really starts getting rural.

Our weather is cooler than I’d like it to be, but I wouldn’t trade it for deep-freeze winters or 99% humidity summers. We don’t get giant flying bugs here, or tornadoes, or hurricanes, or blizzards, or 100-degree days. Grateful for that.

I’m glad we picked this town.