I’m listening to The Wailin’ Jennys and it makes me miss my hometown.
No one in their right mind should ever miss North San Juan.
It was a no-horse-town, covered in a powdery layer of red dust. Its citizens all hippies, cultists, or methheads. Most of my friends were hippies.
We were cultists.
There was a lady who worked at the gas station who only had two teeth, and she always gave the biggest ice-cream scoops.
Because the gas station was also the ice-cream shop.
And the Yuba river, which accidentally wandered into this little town by no fault of its own, was always that same clear crisp green-blue, no matter how many dirty diapers floated away down stream.
On Saturday nights, the kind of summer nights when the sun didn’t set until midnight, we would sit in folding chairs in that wild jungle garden and listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” on a battery operated radio. Swiveling the antenna until the crackling stopped.
