I'm originally from Rotterdam, NY. I grew up in a 3 bedroom ranch home with my parents, my sister, and my grandmother.

I come from a very small town in Montana called Glendive. The population is around 5,000 people. The nearest town is 30 miles away and is a smaller town than mine. You need to travel 70 miles to get to a bigger town and that town is only bigger by about 1,000 or 2,000 people. The local high school is the only high school in the entire county, and my graduating class had 97 students who graduated. Our mascot is a Red Devil, and the idea for this mascot was taken from a bag of Red Devil cement that was being used to build the gymnasium in the early 1940's. I went to this high school, as had my mom, dad, stepmom, all my aunts and uncles and my grandfather. This town is in the badlands, and is surrounded to the south by rocky hills. At the top of the highest hill is a very large crucifix that lights up at night. The people that live there are primarily of German or Norwegian decent. There are as many bars as there are churches. The only places that people work at and have decent salaries are out in the oil fields, at the railroad or at the hospital. There is a small community college on the south side of town that we call "Harvard on the hill," which is near Makoshika state park. On the east side of town, in close proximity to each other, there is: a state penitentiary, a veteran's retirement home, the fairgrounds and a preschool. Just outside of our town a rather unique fruit grows wild, called a chokecherry. they are very bitter but make good jelly, syrup and wine. Over 50% of households there keep a vegetable garden in the summer, (more than any other town in America.) Also more than 50% of households own guns, (breaking and entering is not usually a problem.) The town is also known to be the paddlefishing (fishing for paddlefish, of course,) capitol of the country and we also produce more caviar than any other single town in the United States. The town is located along the Yellowstone river in eastern Montana and is surrounded by beautiful and unique landscape. A nice place to stop if you happen to be traveling along I-94. But be warned, we have no Wal-Mart, McDonald's or many other things of this nature. In the summer it is often above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and in the winter can get down to -40 degrees. And it is almost always very dry. Just a small town in the middle of nowhere.