The Virtues of Rural Life

 I suspect my blogging has reflected my aversion to rural life, having left the rural area where I grew up as soon as I got a permanent job.  Yet I'm ambivalent, as I often am, so I'll link to this piece in the Post, written by the guy who moved his family to Red Lake County, MN after describing it as the worst place in America to live, based on ratings of various criteria.  A paragraph:

Nor, as far as I can tell, have we come up with a good way to quantify nostalgia. Red Lake Falls feels like the kind of town your grandparents would live in, and I mean that in the best possible way. The town's 1,400 residents keep tidy homes on tidy lawns with sprawling vegetable gardens out back. To an adult living here for the first time, it feels like the kind of place you remember visiting during summers in childhood, where memories are built on indolent afternoons spent in broad sunny lawns while the adults relaxed on a screened-in porch with cocktails in their hands.

The author has children, BTW, and I don't, which might explain much.