I grew up in a relatively narrow mountain valley and so I did not experience the incredibly windy version of the state I called home: Wyoming. I found that it was renowned for its winds because much of the state is just a vast open plain. Then, as a young wife, I was blessed to spend the first 14 years of our marriage “stuck” in San Diego as my husband was active-duty Navy and his unusually specific rate resulted in his just being transferred from one base to another in the same city.

Mind you … I am not complaining that I got to spend almost a decade and a half in Southern California, where I could eat free avocados and lemons that my generous neighbors shared from their trees that hung over the fence in our backyard. And every single day there was no snow. It was a very pleasant lifestyle where the ocean breezes wafted over our part of town every day: not too cool, not too warm, just right.

The only learning curve I had in the big city was that, unlike our isolated farm-filled community of my youth, a large urban environment requires certain precautions. You need to lock your house doors. Even if you’re not in a fancy house, there are people who are willing to try and steal what little you own. Cars and trucks and motorcycles are very vulnerable to theft. Some people will act badly toward you, no matter how nicely you treat them. Stuff gets stolen.

The point is that when we moved away from the big city life, to a small rural community that had proximity to an Air Force Base where my husband started his new civilian job, I brought with me my newly acquired city-life survival skills. In the Big City, we’d had a motorcycle stolen, and our garage stripped clean of my husband’s toolset. I’d experienced very negative attention from more than one “man” in the course of my traveling on the city bus system (even in the company of our children!) and we’d had a few bicycles taken from our yard. We’d learned to check our surroundings, and put things away securely.

I discovered shortly after we moved up there, that this part of western Idaho had “wind” that rarely took a breather. The wind was going to blow — the details were “how fast” or “what temperature.” In the summer, it was a steady 30 mph to go along with the 95-degree temperature. And in winter, we could get 40-mph gusts with 33 degrees air temperature. Locals used to insult their neighboring state by saying that the wind didn’t blow in Idaho, it’s just that Oregon sucked so badly.

That first summer we lived there, we came home one afternoon from a shopping trip to the big city that was 50 miles north of us. I was putting away the groceries when our 11-year-old son came in and told me that someone had stolen our tent from the yard. I went outside with him, and, sure enough, the lawn was empty! Our little camping tent that the kids had been using as a playhouse in the side yard was no longer clamped to the ground. Very disappointing!

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. This house we were renting didn’t even have fences or a gate. We could lock the garage and the tool shop buildings, but we were situated a little out of town, and instead of fences surrounding the entire property, the landlord had planted rows of trees that were about half-grown. I recognized that he was creating a wind barrier, but in the meantime, we didn’t imagine that the lack of fencing would result in someone taking advantage of our being gone for the day and stealing our tent. Rats. Also missing were some toys and stuffed animals that had been taken out to play with in their little yard castle.

I grumbled for a day or two about how, even here in the middle of nowhere, there were creepy people who couldn’t keep their hands of other peoples’ stuff. Then, we moved on. At the end of that week, I heard a knock on the back door, and when I opened it, there stood a total stranger, and behind him was our little camping tent, all zipped up with the toys and stuffed friends still inside, tied down in the back of his pick-up truck. He lived about a mile down the road from our house, and this tent blew into his yard at the beginning of the week, and he hadn’t had time till today to drive around asking neighbors if they’d lost it on that extra windy day.

My faith in humanity was restored. I thanked him profusely, the children were delighted, and after he left, I felt ashamed that I’d let my Big City learning overwhelm my positive, country-girl upbringing. Also, we learned to use much bigger tent pegs, and put big rocks inside in the corners of the play-tent when we put it up on the lawn from then on to keep the tent in our yard, and not out Blowin’ in the Wind of the Idaho prairie.