Twenty years ago, I moved to Milwaukee.
My girlfriend in college was from Milwaukee (in fact I had 2 roomates during college who were from Milwaukee). She was engaged and wanted to move back home to be close to her parents for her last year being single. I had never lived away from home and Milwaukee seemed like a good idea. Plus, I had hopes that "something" might work out with her brother. So, we packed up our apartment in Friendly Fridley, MN and came to Milwaukee.
Her job was with the Milwaukee Public School systems and she was required to live in the City of Milwaukee. My job was actually 45 minutes outside of the city in Brownsville, WI. I was working for a cheese company.* We moved out onto the northwest corner of town onto Appleton Avenue.
After a year, she got married and moved to Minneapolis. I stayed in Milwaukee. It always seemed ironic to me that she was living in my hometown and I was living in hers. That's when my mother started dropping hints about when I might be moving back. And honestly, I don't know why I didn't start to. The cheese-job was a mistake (ever had a job where after the flurry of activity on your first day you sit at your desk, look around, and think "OK, this was a mistake"), "something" was actually nothing with her brother, and I needed to find a new apartment because the one we were sharing was too big for me by myself. Why I didn't pack my car and just head back up I-94, I don't know. Well, I did have a great circle of friends and I was starting to look around for a new job. So, I stayed.
Soon after my girlfriend got married I found a new job that I loved. A couple years after that, I met Russell. And now, it's been 20 years - give or take a few years. I still call Minneapolis my hometown, but Milwaukee is home. I love this city.
*Everyone who lives in Wisconsin should work in the dairy industry at least once. It is your social obligation to help keep Wisconsin nominated as America's Dairyland (which everytime I type in Russell's blog id - russface.diaryland.com I always have to make sure I don't type dairyland). Did you know that California passed Wisconsin as America's number one dairy producer? It happened several years ago - maybe even around the time that I moved to Wisconsin.
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2 comments:
Greetings from the California Central Valley..........America's Dairyland!
Just had to throw that in.
Actually, these mega-dairies here come with a lot of disadvantages, noise, smell, pollution. There are just too many cows on each site. All the local crops grown go just to feed the cows.
Lori W
I agree about the smell. The dairy where I worked had it's own waste water treatment plant. It was to treat what they called "moo water". This is the water that is extracted from the milk after producing cheese. It used to be that they would sell this water to farmers to spray on their fields for irrigation. Then some of the neighbors started complaining that their well water was tasting of milk. So, they had to install this waste water treatment plant. Boy if the chemicals in that plant got out of kilter - whew! what a smell.
There's something about the smell of a dairy farm that doesn't really bother me. Maybe if it was a 1,000 cows at a time I'd feel differently.
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