I am a raisin girl living amongst the cornflake girls. It's not a comfortable place to be.

I first came to this town when I was in college. My friends came from the dorms and my classes. I met some incredibly cool people. And then they graduated and most of them moved away, eventually. Some of my best friends stayed around for a while, but then they decided to move on and went to Boise and Salt Lake City, and other such places.

Some friends got jobs. Two have gotten night jobs and sleep all day. They get up at five in the evening.

Currently, the way my life is set up, I meet people who live up here on the hill via different means. And this is the thing: the hill is its own interesting social structure, divided between the town's old rich and new poor.

This hill used to be one of the ritzy parts of town, where the rich lived, and many still do, though they're older folks, retired. This is not a bad thing. I would consider many of them my friends, at least in passing. They are kind, but they have their lives structured in a certain way, and other than the occasional visits, this does not involve adapting life for a young single mother with two excited boys.

There are other streets up here, though. Some of the houses were military housing back in the 1960's and 1970's. A lot of them are now low income rentals, and a lot of the housing up here are houses that were not built by the town's rich. A person's income isn't an issue for me, but lifestyle can be. It's not uncommon to have police show up to these houses in the middle of the night. Let's just leave it at that.

There are, of course, younger mothers who are a lot like me, demographically. But this is where the cornflake and raisin girl reference comes in. These relationships can only get so far. On the surface they're fine. One can have small talk -- safe conversations, but past a certain point these women shut down. A lot of these women have been described as Stepford Wives, and I cannot argue.

I don't do small talk well. I can carry on a perfectly lovely conversation about the weather, but it really doesn't age well for me. And I have done so much of it in my life that I hate even approaching it. I try to avoid it. And this hill is full of small talk. It's full of expectations and people trying to pretend to be perfect when none of us are. There are walls in the relationships, and one can't permeate them.

This isn't completely true for everyone. I have made some good friends up here, but then they have left, often because they're not comfortable here socially. The raisins get eaten up first, and they go away. And I think there are some men I could be friends with, but it's not socially permissible for me to socialize and make friends with these men apart from their wives, particularly when my husband isn't here.

But that leaves an entire town, doesn't it?

Well, sure. There's the university. I have friends who are faculty there. (What does it mean when your friends are the faculty and not the other students? :)) But, alas, one of them is particularly busy pursuing her Ph.D. One of them is convinced I still need to pursue a law suit with the university, and after all these years I really don't want to hear about it anymore. And then there's the anthropology department, but we'll not discuss that right now (back to that law suit again).

There is a writing community in town, but I'm not their kind of writer. It's that genre thing, you know. There may be a group of people interested in speculative fiction, but I suspect it's small, based on previous experience, and I'm not sure I'd fit in. I was aware of it back in the mid-1990's, and mostly it's people who are into the sort of speculative fiction that I'm not so much into. (Tolkein clones, anyone?)