This is where it started: my first visit to the first community: Rugby, North Dakota, January, 2003. Why does one go to Rugby in January, you ask? If you want to see what a town is made of, you have to see it in the tough season, as well as the sweet, and January in Rugby is the tough season.
Wanda seems to be a wise,
a sophisticated, a humble woman. Of being widowed, she says the first year is the toughest: "We are not prepared to be alone." Friends and neighbors, she notes, are quick to offer support, but it lasts only for two weeks or so, then they go on to help the next person who needs it and you are left to wrestle your own grief. When her husband died suddenly some twenty years ago - he was not yet sixty - she asked the doctors for a moment alone with his body in the hospital room. "I told him I'd be along shortly," she said. "But that's not how it has turned out." She continues to live and give in Rugby. And she was not content to tell me her story only, so Wanda called her next door neighbor, Tammy Fossum, and invited her over for coffee and conversation with me.
Tammy was the impetus behind the founding of a Moms' Club in Rugby. She met her husband Randy through her work in the trucking industry when she was living in Grand Forks. Discussion over the phone and via fax turned from business to things more personal and romantic and soon enough they married. When Tammy moved to Rugby, it wasn't long before she found that the Rugby natives in her circumstances - the stay-at-home moms with small children - already had support systems in place, family and friends, and they had little time left to welcome a newcomer who felt awfully alone in her new community. Convinced she couldn't possibly be the only one in Rugby in her predicament, she wondered what to do. On the internet she found information about the Moms' Club and got instructions from the national organization on how to go about founding a chapter in Rugby. She scheduled a meeting for interested moms at the library and found plenty of interest. Soon the group had a charter and bylaws and a president - Tammy herself. Soon they were meeting in the basement of Tammy's house because there was no other space available in Rugby where the noise of all the women's children would be welcome. For the safety of its members, the national organization has a rule against chapters meeting in private homes, a rule Wanda felt she could bend because "I haven't met anyone in Rugby I wouldn't be comfortable inviting into my house."
To be continued....
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