Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former/future tech worker who recently moved back to rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
I’ve slipped through the cracks of the modern banking system into some alternate world. So far, I haven’t seen trolls taking tolls under bridges or dwarves mining for metals in the hills, but I feel like it’s only a matter of time before I find them.
Here are some things I recently bought and how I paid for them:
1) I wrote a check for my town water bill.
I mentioned in a previous post that the lone city water employee was witching for water in my yard. So, it should not surprise you that the water department doesn’t have online bill pay.
Once a month, I get a postcard telling me what I owe for water and garbage. Then I walk to City Hall and hand my check to the city clerk, who went to high school with my dad. We exchange pleasantries for five or ten minutes since she’s usually there by herself. I think she’s forgiven me for stirring up a ruckus recently (I went to a city council meeting to complain about cows in town), but that’s a story for a different day.
The city can barely keep the water department afloat (puns are included with your free subscription to my newsletter!), so I’m guessing the postcard and check system will continue indefinitely.
2) I charged two cans of lime green spray paint to my lumber yard account.
This isn’t a credit card — it’s a store charge account, which feels like the olden days of prairie general stores. The store didn’t check my credit score to open my account; Experian will never know about this unsecured line of credit. They didn’t even ask to see my driver’s license.
The owner opened my account based on the strength of my last name, which is its own kind of credit check around here. I didn’t have legacy status to get me into Harvard, but I got a lumber yard charge account because of my family’s deep and long-lasting patronage, so I guess I’ll own up to my privilege.
Whenever I need something from the lumber yard, I walk in and tell the owner (or the owner’s only employee) what I’m taking, and they add it to my monthly bill. I don’t have to give them my name, since they both know me. And of course, when my bill is mailed to me, I walk to the lumber yard and pay it by check (although they do take credit cards — very modern).
On this visit, I told the owner that if anyone graffiti’d the town with lime green spray paint, I hoped he wouldn’t rat me out. He promised to tell the cops that my brother bought the paint and charged it to me. So maybe there are benefits to going off the grid with purchases.
3) I left cash for a jade plant in a bucket at an unstaffed greenhouse.
I stopped by one of the Amish greenhouses recently. It’s a gorgeous space — one of several Amish greenhouses tucked into hidden corners of the county, found by word of mouth and the occasional signposts pointing the way down miles of gravel roads.
The sign on the door said they were open, but there were no people in sight and they were cleared out of summer plants. There were a thousand mum seedlings growing outside for the fall season, a handful of overlooked perennials, and a few beautiful jade plants. For some reason I can’t keep jade plants alive, which is absurd because I keep many other plants alive and jade is supposed to be easy, but I’ve already killed two of them.
I decided to try again on the jade, but the greenhouse owner was nowhere in sight. I finally noticed a sign on the counter that said ‘self service’. So I calculated the tax, put the cash in a bucket, and left a note with my phone number in case he needed more money. You might think this is absurd since the Amish don’t have phones — but most of the Amish around here have little sheds with solar panels in their yards, which they use to charge a cell phone (especially permissible if they’re doing business with the English).
I’ve heard nothing about my payment, and I haven’t killed the new jade plant yet, so I’m taking it as a win.
Okay, so it’s not all technologically Stone Age-ish. The grocery store recently installed some self checkouts. However, this yielded angry letters to the editor of the local paper, and I think I’ve heard someone complain about self checkout every time I’ve shopped since then.
But switching between rural Iowa and coastal California feels like the preparations I used to make for foreign travel. Coming to Iowa, I make sure I have plenty of currency, ideally in small bills. I order more checks on the regular. I keep track of incoming water bills, gas bills, lumber yard bills, and other things that I can’t set up for autopay. And when I travel elsewhere, I leave signed blank checks for my family to use for all the bills I can’t pay online.
Then I visit San Francisco, and I make sure my phone’s tap-to-pay app is updated and that I remember how to use it to ride MUNI. I redownload Uber and Lyft and DoorDash. I get a little meaningless pleasure from my AmEx platinum landing heavily on the table when I pay a restaurant tab, since it rarely gets used in Iowa.
I sometimes think about how small, insignificant choices like how to pay for things are part of broader cultural norms that define “us” vs “other”.
It’s customary here to pay in cash. People still write checks at the grocery store1, which is one reason why they’re railing against self checkout.
It’s customary in a city to do everything on an app and avoid talking to cashiers and clerks whenever possible2.
I’ve been conditioned by my life in cities (and my field marshal personality) to crave the efficiency and speed of the apps. I’d pay all my bills online if I could.
But I would miss out on a lot of hot gossip at the lumber yard and City Hall if my bills were autopaid. So maybe there’s something to be said for the occasional inefficiency.
//
On an entirely separate note: I’ve changed my newsletter’s name from “Sara Ramsey’s Small Town Life” to “Rural Magic by Sara Ramsey.” My goal is to find what’s beautiful / interesting / magical about this place, and ‘rural magic’ seems like a better fit. I’m also looking ahead to occasional future posts about the novel(s) I’m working on, which have their own kind of magic. Hopefully the new name resonates — let me know if you have thoughts!
Cheers,
Sara
The big stores like Walmart treat checks like debit cards - they’re able to electronically process and debit accounts immediately. This has caused problems for people who used to rely on ‘floating’ checks, knowing they had a couple of days to get money into an account after buying something.
Clarification: it’s customary in certain socioeconomic classes in a city to do everything on an app. There are similarities between urban poverty and rural poverty, and unbanked people are one of them. But no matter the socioeconomic status of people in a rural area, the apps don’t work — even the doctors can’t get an Uber after their shifts.
I love everything about this
Laughing--love this! Whenever I'm back in my hometown I, too, have to remind myself to bring cash, especially for donations to whatever is being collected for at the center street light by volunteers with buckets. The first time I drove through and said, "Sorry, I have no cash." everyone looked at me like, "Sure... greedy, selfish person." Lesson learned!