A safe place to live?

I was born in Maine and lived there for 22 years before I joined the Navy in 1957. I went back again in 1974 when I married my present wife and lived there for another twenty years. Maine is a beautiful state to live in; but they have mosquitoes and black flies in the spring and most of the summer and, of course, there are those raging winters to contend with. There’s an old saying up there: We have two seasons; winter and July.

At one time, we thought it might be nice to have a place in Florida. It’s warm there most of the year and it almost never snows. The beaches are everywhere if you like beaches and I think that half of the people who live there are from Maine and Ohio. But as you no doubt have noticed, they have hurricanes down there that seem to be getting more frequent and stronger with each passing year. They’re not, but it might seem that way to the uninformed.

I fell in love with the Northwest years ago. It’s lush and green there and has cold, clear streams and rivers. It has great fishing and the fish are big. The winters are mild up there; at least they are along the coast, but it stops raining for only about a week in August. Maybe that’s why the area seems to breed so many serial killers. That weather would depress me, also.

Now that I have lived in or traveled in all four corners of the U.S., I find myself living in the eastern part of the Mid-west. The winters here are milder than in the Northeast and the summers are hotter. We are far enough east of the plains country to avoid most of the killer tornadoes spawned there. Living near the foothills of the Appalachians is great. Those mountains seem to push most of the severe weather east or west of us. I think I have found the best of all places to live right here in Logan. I think I’ll stay a while.

Of course, If you ignore most of the things that go on around you, any place might seem safe. As we all know, small towns, or cities, have almost no crime at all. Right? However, right here in Logan we have had horrendous murders that can match any committed in those crime laden big cities like Los Angeles (I lived there for many years) or New York. Murders where the poor victims were dismembered and thrown away like garbage or horribly murdered and were tossed into septic tanks.

It seems as if every month or so, child molesters and rapists are on the front pages of The Logan Daily News. As soon as they get put away, along comes another one. It appears that no matter where I live or have lived, or might go to live, has crime is awaiting me. We may not have the quantity of crime that big cities have, but we can match the horrific quality of it with any of them. So, I guess I’ll stay here for the rest of my life, however long that may be.

Instead of committing crimes, I’ll just write about them. Fiction of course. At the moment, I’m trying to figure out how to resurrect a female werewolf that I killed off in one of my books. In real life, I’m too old and tired to actually go out and commit crimes, anyway. That probably makes you feel a lot better, doesn’t it?