Morris, Minnesota is a great place to grow up if you prefer Taco John’s over Taco Bell.
I used to live on 4th street. I would look out the window and watch college students walk the snowy sidewalk towards campus. Some of them wore shorts. At the time, I considered this one of the crazier things that big kids did, probably because my mother was so adamant that it was a bad thing for them to do.
My brother wanted an apple tree and our pastor got us one. We rented from the pastor. So, I guess the pastor got himself an apple tree. The tree didn’t produce apples until after we moved away. Not that far away. Only a few blocks really. But to a little kid in a small town, we moved away.
We had boundary lines. You weren’t supposed to bike past them. “No, No, No!” read the boundaries in my father’s chalky handwriting. I was good at keeping to the boundaries.
One year, our father led the Youth Group. We got to see the big kids a lot. I miss the big kids. I wish they were still 16 years old.
We had a friend. He was our parents’ friend but he was our friend too. He lived with us for a while. At some point, he got a job at Pizza Hut. Sometimes in the morning, we would discover that he had brought home pizza for us to eat. You need good friends like our parents’ friend who was our friend too.
The Bible was important in Morris, Minnesota. We went to Bible Studies at our friends’ homes. Our friends usually lived a little bit outside of an even smaller town not too far from Morris, Minnesota. Bible Studies were fun. You got to see your friends and eat a snack.
We did school at home in Morris, Minnesota. A lot of our school anyways. After a while, we did some of our school at the school. Either way was fine really. School was nice because you got grades. Getting grades was good for some of us.
If you like farm kids and professors’ kids, Morris, Minnesota is a great place to grow up.