I have had a lot of people ask me why we moved to Wisconsin. It’s not a simple answer and I have tried to come up with a quick informational blurb but I cant seem to shrink down my explanation to a digestible sound bite like “I just really love Jell-o Salads” or “I've been dying to participate in a meat raffle”
So…if you are interested. Here is the shortest version I can come up with.
When we moved to Belltown it topped a bunch of lists as one of the best place to live in Seattle and for many years it was the perfect place for my family. 13 years later it tops a different list. This time, depending on the source, Belltown is ranked the most dangerous neighborhood in Seattle with a crime rate of 480% above the national average. Now, I take these kinds of list with a grain of salt but it was getting harder to ignore. We were frogs who were slowly boiling and convincing ourselves it was fine. Things were starting to decline in the years leading up to 2020 but Covid gave it a turbo boost. The boiling point was a random assault that shook our sense of security. While the physical wounds healed quickly, the trauma remained and we knew it was time to get out of Dodge.
I love Seattle and I have always been it’s biggest cheerleader but it was no longer a place I needed to live. Most of our favourite haunts had shut down, I didn’t feel comfortable letting the kids wander our neighborhood alone, Mark’s company was acquired and his Seattle offices were shut down, my downtown Seattle company didn’t survive the pandemic, our oldest was in college with his own apartment and the youngest was going to start high school in a place where none of her friends were zoned to go. It seemed like a great time to relocate to somewhere a little less murdery.
Mark’s job offered us the flexibility to move around the United States and after an exhaustive search of places we could afford, places that were safe and somewhat liberal and places where we would actually want to live, we settled on Madison, Wisconsin, An artsy liberal college town in southeast Wisconsin. The housing market is hot right now and so we had to set our sights a little further out than we had originally hoped which is how we ended up in Sun Prairie, a quick jaunt from Madison’s Eastside. Fun Fact, Sun Prairie is the Groundhog Capitol of the World and also home to 18 designated pizza places…but that’s another post for another time.
So that’s the capsule version. It’s a lot to write into a Facebook comment or a casual conversation in the grocery store so in those cases I’m just gonna stick with my stock. “We are part of the witness protection program”
