by Greg Schmidt

“I was born in a small town and I’ll die in a small town,” sang John Mellencamp. While the former isn’t true for me, the latter might be. I was born and lived most of my life in the metropolitan New York area, and this is my first time living in a small town. Indeed, when I accepted the position of minister at the Congregrational Church, the idea of moving here caused some trepidation. I felt almost like Lisa Douglas moving to Hooterville on Green Acres. How long would it take before I felt like a real resident of this town?

Before moving here to Green Acres, I lived in culturally oppressive communities that required me to share my water and septic with everyone. My children never had the option of taking fluoride pills before, and I never had the pleasure of watching someone pump the sewage out of my personal storage tank. Who knew it could be so entertaining? How in the world was someone as sheltered as myself going to fit in here?

I’ve done my best to do that. Within a week of moving in, my wife got an awful case of poison ivy, and I got bitten by a tick. Everyone in Harvard gets poison ivy, we learned, and everyone picks up a tick. Neither of these made me feel like a local, though.

Then there was the deer my car managed to hit while driving to a church meeting one night. Evidently this is another rite of passage for citizens of the town. “Eventually we all hit a deer,” someone explained. So, after months of chasing after deer in an attempt to get this eventuality over with, I finally got one. Actually, it hit me. So why didn’t fulfilling my obligation to hit a deer still keep me from feeling like a local? The police log merely passed it off as “car hit deer on Ann Lee Road.” (I guess I should be grateful the headline wasn’t “Local Pastor Kills One of God’s Creatures.”) Still, not even the $2,500 bill for the damage to the car affirmed my feeling as a local. I am just more fearful driving down my street at night.

There is good news, though. I may have finally hit upon the answer to feeling like a local. In the last snowstorm, my mailbox fell over. Believe it or not, I couldn’t blame the plow drivers, even though I’ve seen the carnage they have inflicted upon the poor defenseless mailboxes around town. On closer inspection of my newly horizontal post, I saw that the wood had simply rotted away. How was I to get mail with my mailbox lying on the ground and the ground too frozen to dig a new hole?

The answer was simple: it now sits in a bucket of sand on the front lawn. Many of you know what this is like, as I have seen your many creative attempts at keeping a mailbox post standing in front of your houses. Until now I used to smile at the oddity of these solutions, but I now appreciate the art and science involved in the process. I’m not sure if this truly classifies me as a local or not, but at least it makes me feel less like an outsider. Maybe, like Oliver Wendell Douglas in Hooterville, one day I just might fit in after all.

The Reverend Dr. Greg Schmidt is pastor of the Congregational Church.