I grew up in the middle of nowhere. We were the last house on the road with miles of open country between us and juniper-covered hills far to the north. I usually had a lot of work to do, but when I had some free time, I loved to ride my horse across the sagebrush-covered rangeland.

Then for a time, I lived in some of the bigger cities in New York. It was a huge culture shock for me. But after a while, I got used to the fast pace of city living. When I returned home, some of the things about the simpler lifestyle of rural living made me smile. One thing I realized I had missed was our small-town newspaper. It contained news like police reports, which I never saw in a paper in New York, probably because they would take up the whole paper. But it wasn’t just the fact that the paper had room to carry the reports, but what was in them that was different from life in the big cities.

The local paper doesn’t carry police reports anymore, but before they quit, I had made quite a collection of ones I found to be humorous or different compared to my life in big cities. I thought I’d share a few here.

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