More reunion thoughts.

Responses to the reunion mailing are beginning to come in. We're hoping for a big turnout, but wonder just how many people are out there. I worry when envelopes come back with a yellow "undeliverable" sticker.

After so many years away, it's easy to think of our town as it was in this picture. (One of my classmates swears he knows who owned the two-tone green car in the foreground!)



However, another classmate, who still lives on her family's farm, reminds me that things have changed. In the past few years, her neighborhood has suffered from wild parties and drug trafficking, and she says only the snow that blanketed the area from December to March calmed things a bit this winter. "You knew the town at its best," she says.

Not that it was ever a perfect place. I remember an afternoon in about 1954 when a veteran, bored or suffering from flashbacks, spent an hour or two firing random shots out the window of a ramshackle apartment building about two blocks from the house I grew up in.

There's a novel about our town, based around a murder in 1901 and a double suicide in 1902. The house where the murder happened still stands - across the street from the church involved in a shooting last spring.