Small town living

1. Yesterday I made my second trip to Olean, NY, which is an hour away, to go to Walmart. One can buy a surprising number of things at the Dollar General here in town (including an ironing board and a grill), but not everything.

You know you live in a small town when you say to yourself, "Hmm, I really need a better quality rug than I can get at Dollar General, so I think I'll drive an hour to get a high-quality rug at . . . Walmart."

2. I filled out forms to register the boys for school this morning. On the application, it asks for the usual: name, date of birth, phone number, physical address. In my experience "physical address" means where you live versus a post office box, so I expected the next address section to be for P.O. boxes. It was not. It reads, and I quote, "Descriptive address: route # and/or road name and neighbor's name."

Yes, neighbor's name.

I learned when David and I were looking at houses here that addresses mean very little. No one knows what you mean if you say that you're looking at a house on Oak Street until someone helpfully adds, "the Miller house." In fact, if you look at real estate listings online, the address is listed in normal size font second to the larger, bolded, name of the person who lives there. Or who lived there previously. Perhaps 100 years ago.

3. Have I mentioned how nice it is for everything to be so close? We live about 75 feet from the library, a block from the park, and .5 miles from the grocery store. The longest it takes to get anywhere in town is about 4 minutes. For someone as famous as I am for forgetting the key ingredients to everything I cook, it's nice to be able to go to the store and back in six minutes. I went three times Monday.