If you're looking for a nice, quiet community to settle down to or raise kids how about Eureka, SD? My Grandma, who turns 101 this July, has moved out of her house and my Mom has been diligently working at getting everything ready for the auction. This is the house my Grandpa built after they got married, out on the farm east of town. After raising three kids and sending them off to college they retired in the 60's and moved the whole house to town.

Our family lived a few hundred miles away in Nebraska. Us kids got dropped off for a month or so in the Summer, alternating between the Grandparents in town or staying on the farm with our cousins. There's a nice lake in town where we fished regularly, mostly catching bullheads. If there were two or more of us in town the rest of the time was filled with other adventures, chief of which was playing hide-n-seek in the house. Not ones to waste anything, our Grandparents built closets into every nook and cranny. Three foot high closets which went down and around corners like rabbit dens. Terrific hiding places. Otherwise town was kind of boring for kids, at least compared to the adventures on the farm.

On the farm we killed time doing chores and killing gophers. The county offered a bounty on gopher tails, 3 cents each if I remember correctly. We'd lay traps, use BB guns, rocks, even loop a strand of baling twine noose-like over a hole, waiting for a curious head to pop up. At the end of the week it was time for town, maybe a fair or "crazy days." Every town in the midwest had some sort of crazy days. Some travelling salesman peddling town's a selection of "crazy" events to stimulate commerce. We'd pile into the station wagon or the back of our Uncle's pickup. Wiry, leather skinned kids with fresh crew cuts clasping mason jars half filled with ripening gopher tails. We'd take our hard earned gopher money and buy jaw breakers, comic books, and fire crackers.

Unlike Nebraska, South Dakota allowed the sale of inch and a halfers, veritable dynamite for kids. Hours could be spent trying to find the perfect receptacle for the last firecracker. A prize challenge was getting the explosion to happen mid-air in the water well. Fail, and the firecracker sizzled out in the water. Succeed and the reward was a subterranean sonic boom like no other. It was trying to stuff a short fused firecracker into this well and blowing the skin off of three fingers that got me grounded for the whole 4th of July one year.

Not my first or last grounding. Too much imagination and not enough respect were just a few of my obvious faults. Grounded for telling my nieces a story about an Aunt who blew up because she exceeded the time limit on her eighteen hour girdle. Grounded for slicing my leg open. Actually not quite clearing a barbwire fence when the German Shepard and I were trying to lose the girls. Ironically it was the two girls who ended up untangling me and getting bandaids, but then also ended up squealing on me.

Most of the farm houses have a small porch on the second floor, probably the only exit during some of the winter storms they got in the 40's. It was a great place to watch the evening storms roll in. There's nothing quite as bracing as the light and sound show of a midwestern thunderstorm. We'd sit out there counting the seconds between flash and crack of lightning, judging the distance. Eventually there wasn't any discernable delay and we'd dive into the house to avoid being fried.

There was a painting hanging in the upstairs guest room at my Grandparents. It depicts the grey-green sky of an impending thunderstorm boiling overhead, could even turn into a twister. Heading towards you is a train, smoke billowing out of stacks, and it is barrelling down on a farmer's cart at the train crossing. The horses and cart seem to be partially levitated and I can't remember much about the driver, but there's a young woman in a nice summer dress. The wind of the storm has hold of the dress and the shock of the train has the rest of her, suspended there, arms upraised. You can't tell if she's going to make it, maybe she'll fall off the back and escape. The horses are goners, no doubt, but you can't tell about her. They are all locked there in this vivid struggle and you just can't tell.

That was the room us kids slept in, under the eternal train wreck. I should ask Grandma where that came from...and why. I'm not sure if the painting is part of the auction or not. Maybe Mom reserved it to hang above her guest bed for the next generation of grandkids.

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