Loup City Community

Between going to church on Sunday morning and attending a soup luncheon, stopping by the local Snack Shop, attending an 8th grade basketball game, and stopping by for a meal at the Legion Club I’ve seen a large sense of community in this town. For a few short days I was welcomed by everyone. They all had questions to ask and some were quite thrilled that I stopped by Loup City and in some way helped put their little town on the map. Everywhere I went people were visiting, waving, and saying hello. Everyone knows everyone. Nothing but endless amounts of friendly people.

In a short amount of time in Loup City I got a great picture of the town. I met people who lived here their entire lives, even their parents lived here their entire lives. Pastor Barbara at church used to live in Spartan Village in East Lansing and work at Sparrow Hospital. She even attended the same church as my mom back in the mid 60s, it would later be the same church that my parents were married in. Meeting George was another perspective, he grew up in the city in New Jersey. He and his wife just moved to Loup City a few years ago coming from Boulder, CO looking to get out of the city life. On this trip I’ve been thinking about my own homecoming a lot and what it will be like to return. But I learned about Mike, and a homecoming like no other. He was one of the 52 prisoners in Iran during 1979, spending over a year in prison. I met Kevin and Janelle who graduated high school together and are both happy to still be living here. Between them all was a number of professions, carpenter, mortician, marine, farmer, and more.

So the verdict is a good one. Small town life is the way to go. It would be a great place to raise a family. However, as George and I talked it’d be a tough place to live for someone like myself, a single 20-something-year-old who’s still trying to figure out what to do with life. But one day I won’t be surprised if I settle in a little town where the nearest stoplight, movie theatre, and McDonald’s is at least a 30 mile drive.