Jen Gienapp: Life In Wyoming Is Grand

  • Sunday, October 19, 2014
  • Jen Gienapp

I think since moving out to Wyoming almost four years ago, I thought of it as a sort of temporary move.

My roots are in the South, and that’s where I’ve assumed I’ll end up in my retirement years. Until now, I’ve thought of this as a kind of adventure, not a serious life change. After all, I assume all of my kids will probably end up in the South or East, and I want to be near my grandchildren, right?

But the more I think about it and I enjoy my days here in this Wild West, the more I’m in love with it, and feel at home.

I think I could grow old here.

I recently spent a week in Chattanooga, and that week was a dream, really. I saw many friends and family, and enjoyed so much Chattanooga (the big city) has to offer (thanks, New City Fellowship, Covenant, Mojo, Starbucks, Ironman, etc.).

As always, when I go back to visit, I went through a bit of culture shock, dealing with traffic, sirens, and locking of doors.

I adapted fairly quickly, but found myself thinking of home, where traffic is the annoyance of one car ahead only going 40 mph on the dirt road, sirens are never heard at our house, and who locks their doors, even when they go out of town for five days?! As I told someone in Chattanooga, it’s a completely different lifestyle for sure.

I probably have friends here who have grown up in Wyoming, who think I’m still a Wyoming young’un. That’s probably true. I’ll always be a transplant. But after a few years, I think the state has bitten me, and I’m ready to stay. Even though I’ve always said I want to be buried in Forest Hills, I think I’d be okay, if I ended up buried in Wyoming.

The wind here is incessant, and the winters are so very long. I have yet to grow really great gardens, either vegetable or flowers, because the soil is just so bad, and the growing season is so short. Our grass is brown, 10 months out of the year. We only have about 15 trees in our yard, and they’re all pine. I do miss the colors of the hardwoods. We wear jeans and sweatshirts ¾ of the year, and our laundry room is overflowing with coats, snow pants, boots, gloves and mittens. Our kids have gotten used to the fact that snow days are pretty hard to come by, and sometimes if they come, they’re in June. It takes us 15 minutes to get to the nearest gas station for a gallon of milk, and eight minutes to get to our mailbox.

But, as I’ve been told hundreds of times, people here put up with all of that for the two or three months of blessed, beautiful summer and the wide open spaces. There is no need for air conditioning, no humidity, very few bugs (except for the moths that come for a couple weeks every summer), there are wild flowers galore, and long, beautiful, peaceful evenings, with magnificent sunsets. There is certainly a wildness to it all, and the big sky can be overwhelming in its vastness. But oh, what beauty there is.

When we moved, I knew very little about Wyoming, its rich history, or all it has to offer, with nature, culture, and national monuments. It was just a state “out west somewhere”. I am thrilled to have had the opportunity for the past few years to learn more than a few things about it.

Even though Tennessee will always be the state of my birth and sweet home for so many years, I’m gaining pride daily in my other home state. It’s pretty fun to say you live in the least-populated state in the nation (to put that in perspective, Wyoming’s population is about 564,000, which is only 215,000 more than just Hamilton County alone). Wyoming has only one U.S. state representative in Congress, and was the first state/territory to grant women the right to vote. Wyoming also had the first female governor in the nation.

I could go on about fun facts about this great state, but I’ll leave it at that. And while my roots will always be in Tennessee, I will say if you ever get the chance to make a trip to Wyoming, you really must do it. You won’t be sorry. 

 

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