Roots and Roads

After a little hiatus, this blog is getting a facelift.

When I started Boomtown Diaries, it was 2012 and the oil boom was in its heyday. I was teaching and single, living on my family’s farm and trying to navigate my 20s, the dating world, and the craziness that the oil boom brought with it. The quiet towns and countryside that I knew growing up were gone, and every day it seemed new oil rigs were going up and new things were happening, both good and bad.

I love to write and wanted a way to record what I was experiencing, so I started the blog Boomtown Diaries to tell some of those stories.

Four years later, things have changed. The oil boom is a bust. There are various speculations about how long the bust will last, and if and when the boom will come back, and what will happen to the price of oil, but one thing is for sure: Things have slowed down around here, along with our state’s economy. To be honest, it comes with a bit of a sigh of relief. Our communities have room to breathe, to catch up on infrastructure, and to finally gather themselves, whether or not the boom comes back in full force.

Personally, things have changed for me as well. I am still teaching, but I changed my single status in 2014 after my long adventure to Asia.

And this year came the biggest change of all when I became a mother to my little guy, Kasen, in April.

With all of these changes, there are still so many things to write about in western North Dakota, whether it is updates on the slowdown in oil, mishaps on the farm, the new high school our community opened this spring, the latest recipe my husband or I am trying out, or a trip down to the badlands.

So in this post, I introduce my new blog to you: Roots and Roads. Roots, because my family has deep roots to this place, North Dakota, that give a sense of connection and tradition and history. Roads, because they are the connectors between us and adventure, us and experiences, us and other people, and us and memories. Think of all the roads we use every day: the dirt roads that we live on, the highways that take us to work and to church and to town on Saturday night, the interstate that takes us west to adventures, and that trail that we drive down when we need a little solitude. Roads, both literal and symbolic, expand our lives and give us the freedom that we crave.

This blog will hopefully capture that necessary balance in life between the roots that ground us, no matter where we are from, and the roads that take us everywhere.