A summer’s night in Shelton is all I need to remember why this place is where I’ll end my days.

My town.

My home.

I doubt I could ever think of Shelton as anything but that, no matter what happened here when I was a girl.

I stop for cat food at the minimart down the road from the sheriff’s office.

Shannon Carson is behind the counter. She and I were high school classmates, though not close. She’s been working nights as a cashier to pay for an online degree in accounting for almost two years. I congratulate her when she tells me she just finished her classes.

“This is a town of late bloomers,” she says, putting Millicent’s food into a plastic bag.

I can’t argue that one.

“Heard about the case you’re working on,” she says.

I’m sure everyone has, I think.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sad one.”

She waits for me to elaborate, but I don’t.

“Yeah,” she says to fill up the dead air between us. “Nothing like that happens around here.”

I can’t argue that one, either. While the rest of the world changes with the times, we stay mostly the same. Mostly. The Skyline Drive-In Theater, a fixture and location for more rites of passage than could ever be counted, is still in operation, just as it was when the first cars lined up for outdoor movies in 1964. We are the Christmas Tree Capital of the World, and that’s no phony creation of a too-eager chamber of commerce. Simpson owned our lumber mill when my dad worked those brutal shifts, but didn’t mind. Hard work was fine with most everyone back then. When I became a deputy on patrol and then later a detective, I seldom worked a case in which I didn’t know someone by name or reputation. Shelton was and always will be that kind of place. Everyone knows everyone. We hike in the Olympic foothills in T-shirts and shorts at the first hint of warm weather, clam and crab on our rocky and sometimes stinky beaches like the Skokomish people have done for centuries. We grab hold of every minute of our dappled summers, because we know that by the end of September our feet will grow webs until spring.

Newcomers with buckets of cash from Seattle jobs or real estate they’ve unloaded think we’re quaint, if not a complete throwback to another era.

We smile at that, if only to ourselves. It’s good to be all of that when the alternative is big-city life and all the problems and discontent it seems to bring with it.

We’ll take small-town any day.