<a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_8FX19ncyFB4/RpeouqG4laI/AAAAAAAABlg/pb9Fvhg9qro/s1600-h/fields.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5086719823668876706" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_8FX19ncyFB4/RpeouqG4laI/AAAAAAAABlg/pb9Fvhg9qro/s320/fields.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Technically, I've always lived in the Midwest, although I like to argue that my home state of Michigan is The North. However you see it, in 2001 I moved to the true Midwest—to a place our local meteorologist refers to as "East-Central Illinois," to be exact. It doesn't get more cornfield than this.</span></span>

<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Halfway to Normal is actually where my friend Dorie lives, if you're starting at my house and driving due west on I-74. About 25 miles into the cornfields, you see a couple of grain elevators and a small racetrack and a restaurant called "Restaurant." That's the exit for Farmer City. If you keep driving for another 25 miles, you'll be in Normal, Illinois. Not that we have a particular reason to ever go there.</span></span>

Which is the point of this blog, really. Being halfway to Normal, or somewhere in the vicinity, I've discovered, is just about the right place to be. At least it's the place where I've found myself, and balance for my life, and love. It's the place where my life has become entwined with the lives of people from all over the country and the world—people of many skin colors and backgrounds. It's the place where I've become family with my husband's ex-wife and her partner. It's the place where I've found Christian community that thrives in the bar and around the dining room table as well as in the church on Sunday mornings. It's where my daughters have experienced their first Passover and Hanukah celebrations, just a stone's throw away from a grain elevator in a place that couldn't be less Jewish. Each day, life here in this small part of the Midwest presents the most surprising combination of exactly what one might expect and <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> expect. In other words, I have stories to tell.