Find Your Spot

Written by Jaqueline Wolven, Arkansas Women Bloggers Miss July 2013

Ten years ago, after deciding we were ready to leave city life, we looked for a small community to move to that we thought might be a good fit for our little family. The prerequisites were that it had to be a tourist destination (we wanted to make sure that it was nice enough that visitors liked it too), had to have a Unitarian church, and it had to have a private independent school.

We used Find Your Spot online to narrow our choices. Every single time we put in our criteria Eureka Springs, Arkansas came up. I had never heard of the little Victorian village. My husband though had. When he was six years old he and his family had visited to attend the Great Passion Play. He remembered camels.

We knew we liked the Ozarks after living for a year at East Wind, an intentional community (read commune) in Missouri. It is it’s own bio-region with plants and animals found only here. It had four seasons that were pretty mild (except late July and August which are humidity hell.) So, my husband jumped in our little Hyundai and drove cross-country from San Francisco to check it out and, if he liked it, rent a house. After surveying the available properties, talking to the headmaster of the private school and attending church he decided that we should take the leap.

So we did. For me… sight unseen.

That was a little over 9 years ago. We celebrate our 10^th year anniversary in September.

Sure, there are things I miss in California and given a different economy and less people I might be interested in moving back. I am a Southern California girl with a San Francisco heart through and through, but I have found plenty of things to love about my little adopted town. So much so, that I am a community organizer (ie Main Street director) advocating to keep it alive and preserved. I want generations after me to fall in love with my little American dream town just like we did.

Sure, there are things that make me crazy. Small town things like gossip, stick in the muds, and how slow things are to change. There are things that make me crazy about my adopted state (ask me about that at another time). Even in the frustrating moments I can see why we decided that, yes, choosing this town was so right for us. In Eureka Springs, we are fierce advocates for small, we fought to keep a WalMart out and won, we are currently fighting a huge electric company from ruining our landscape with mega lines, we celebrate the arts, culture and each other, we advocate for our environment and our right to be eclectic, we offer domestic partnerships and celebrate diversity, we are a place for people to try new things and learn to love who they are, and mostly we who live here and visit love being here because we chose it.

I’m lucky because not only did we choose a great place to live, but also I get to spend part of my time advocating for it in my community and across the nation. I get to be part of what makes it special. That’s a pretty cool town that accepts someone from far away and lets her share that love in every little way.

So here’s to small towns; yours and mine. Celebrate each day you get to spend time in one because they are special places filled with people who are living their version of the American dream (and they are disappearing) and when it gets frustrating (trust me it will) remember that keeping these beautiful, eclectic places alive is an important part of our heritage. We all deserve to spend a little time walking down a quiet lane, meeting a shopkeeper in the street, and listening to the birds chirp in the trees above.

Stop by my site and let me know what Find Your Spot said where you should live or tell me what you love about your small town. I’d love to hear!