Welcome to On the Drift

Holli Hartman is making a move. Follow along with this newsletter.

I’ve been threatening to move back to the Midwest for a few years now. I’ve tipped over the age of 50 and have grown weary of Denver. It was the perfect place for me 25 years ago when I needed to get out of Iowa and find a law school that would take someone who didn’t study too hard for the LSAT. But now it takes 25 minutes to thread through the Texas and California license plates on the five miles of I-25 I take to work every day. The homeless have been pushed from downtown outward and are now setting up camps off the Evans and Yale exits, just a mile from my home. That home, a tiny little 1956 ranch with no basement, has escalated in value to a point where I can no longer ignore the opportunity to cash out.

Today I made good on the threat. I accepted a job offer from Hormel Foods in Austin. Austin, Minnesota, not Texas. Austin, Minnesota, which is about an hour and 45 minute drive from Algona, Iowa, where I grew up and where my retired widowed seventysomething mother, Bonnie, still lives. I’m pulling up the shallow roots I propagated in the Queen City of the Plains and moving back to the place that I could never stop calling home — the Midwest. I start the job on March 1.

This newsletter is my way of telling the story of this new adventure of mine, how it happened, why it’s happening, and who I’m meeting along the way. This newsletter will provide specific details for family and friends so they can all get the information simultaneously, but it’s also my way of chronicling my big life change and journaling through the excitement, anxiety, wonder, fear, humor, love and sadness I’m sure to experience along the way. Maybe it also could become a resource for some out there who are looking for a roadmap on how to do something like this. I tried to unearth one myself on the interwebs but couldn’t find much in the way of blogs by middle-aged single women who decide to quit their high-paying plum legal job in a desirable hot-market city to move to a smallish forgotten factory town.

So welcome to “On the Drift,” my newsletter about making the move from the Rocky Mountain Front Range to the edge of what’s called the Driftless area of southeast Minnesota. I’ll be posting links to this newsletter on some of my social media feeds, but I’m going to avoid using those feeds to broadcast details. I realize this will at times come across as the pet project of a narcissist, and the newsletter format allows people to dive in and out of this story at their leisure. It’s easy to ignore crap you don’t really want to read that lands in your inbox. Those who remain interested won’t mind the extra click.

I don’t know how often I’ll post. I don’t ever intend to turn this newsletter into a paid subscription format. Sometimes a post may bullet point some quick information because I can’t seem to manage all the daily to-dos that come with making a major move. Sometimes it will tell a more in-depth tale and assign further reading through hyperlinks. Maybe I’ll figure out how to include images or even videos. Consume as much or as little as you’d like. Have fun posting comments or questions below and pointing out my typos.

Stay tuned for upcoming topics such as: (a) what my new job will entail; (b) where the hell am I actually going to live?; (c) the roadside geology of the Driftless; (d) whether I can get an employee discount on the SPAM® family of products; and (e) fear and loathing on I-90.

Oh, and, some housekeeping …

My views do not represent the views of Hormel Foods Corporation and I am not now, nor will I be after I start my new job, a spokesperson for the company.

The email banner photo was taken by Chris Stindt. I don’t know Chris, but I found his/her/their beautiful photo of a bike rider on the Driftless and wanted to make sure credit was given. I hope to be that rider soon.