My husband is barely out the door five minutes when the phone rings.

“Are you calling to make sure I didn’t just go back to bed?” I ask. I am a writer. Such things do happen. It’s not as if I need to punch the clock at 8am to get my work done.

“No. I just passed One Mile Lake and saw a family of four swans.”

Fawns, I think he says. This fits my fantastical Disney-on-acid take on the world as well as anything.

I clarify, “A family of fawns is swimming across the lake?”

“Swans! Swans, baby. There are swans swimming in One Mile.”  There’s snow on the highway, huge puddles in the ditches, swans on the lake.

This is the place I live.

I knew it was my happy place the day a cowboy rode past me and asked “Which way to the beach?”

This fall, I worked with a crew of wickedly talented local writers, including Katherine Fawcett, Natalie Langmann and Todd Lawson,  to string a few story jewels on Tourism Pemberton’s baubly new website. “Some people mistakenly think it’s just a bedroom community,” wrote Susan Reifer, urging folk to discover the unexpected. “Others mistakenly think it’s one big potato farm. In fact, Pemberton is a hidden gem.”

It’s a place where deer could take a dip by the highway and I wouldn’t bat an eye. It’s good to call it home.