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You meet them in every small town - people who went away for a while, but came back. Shelly Olson's like that. She grew up on a dairy farm in northern Minnesota. She went off to college. She taught school for a year in the Twin Cities. Then she ended up teaching kindergarten in Moose Lake. She lives 20 miles down the road from her parents' farm. And that's where she plans to stay. Her husband grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, but he's sold on small town life, too. Especially after what happened last summer.

	Shelly Ecklund Olson lives in Moose Lake, Minn. She grew up on a farm about 20 miles from Moose Lake, and has lived most of her life in that area. She and her husband, Paul, say they love living in a small community. See more images of the Olson family. (MPR Photo/Chris Julin)

It's a school night, and the Olson kids are making some popcorn before they go to bed. Andy's 8. His sister, Dana, is 6. They're bounding around the kitchen in their pajamas. Dana ducks out of the room for a minute and comes clunking back. She's got a shiny, stainless steel walker. It's a little kid version of something you expect to see at a retirement home.

Dana used the walker for a while after her pelvis got smashed. She doesn't need it any more, but she still plays with it sometimes. Her accident was back in July.

That was a tough month for the Olsons. First their house burned. A few days later, one of the guys who'd come to repair the house ran over Dana with his van. Shelly Olson says the news about her daughter traveled fast.

"Everybody knew within probably two hours," she says. "Somebody went to the Dairy Queen and found out there. It was at the car wash, and it was at the school, and people were coming to the hospital in Moose Lake before we even got her in the helicopter to get her out of town."

Shelly Olson's daughter spent about a week in a Duluth hospital. Every day, her room filled with visitors who'd made the 40-mile drive from Moose Lake.

Shelly Olson says she's always liked living in Moose Lake. So has her husband, Paul. But they say the fire, and their daughter's accident, made them really think about the reasons they like it.

When their house burned, more than a dozen firefighters were on the scene. The Olsons knew most of them by their first names. One of the men on the crew offered to let them stay at his house. Shelly Olson says she was overwhelmed by the generosity of the people in her town.

"We had complete strangers that heard about our situation send money, cards, gifts," she says. "That might happen in Minneapolis. I know there's wonderful people down there. I met lots of wonderful people when I lived down there. But I really think that a small town is almost like a big family. People do genuinely take care of one another."

	The Ecklund family of Askov, Minn. •Parents - John and Ruth Ann Ecklund. John was raised in Askov, Ruth Ann in Hinckley. Married in 1963. They live on the family farm in Askov. Four children. •Shelly (Ecklund) Olson. Born in 1967. Graduated St. Scholastica in 1989. Moved to St. Paul for one year and then back to Moose Lake in 1990. Teaches kindergarten in the elementary school. Married Paul in 1991. Two children, Andy and Dana. •Daniel Ecklund. Born in 1968. Graduated University of Minnesota, Duluth in 1991. Graduated U of M Medical School in 1995. He and his wife, Leah, married in 1996 and live in LaCrosse, Wis. •David Ecklund. Born in 1973. Graduated Gustavus Adolphus College in 1995. Graduated U of M Medical School in 2000. Currently in residency in pediatrics at three hospitals in the Twin Cities. Lives in Minneapolis. Read Dave's thoughts on growing up in Askov. •Erik Ecklund. Born in 1980. Currently in third year at UMD in elementary education. Lives in Duluth.Read Erik's thoughts on where he wants to live. (Photo courtesy of Shelly Olson)

Paul Olson is happy to take a visitor on a tour of the town in his pick-up truck. He grew up in Bloomington, but he came to Moose Lake to teach elementary school 16 years ago. This year he took a new job at a local computer company.

As he drives, he talks about Moose Lake as if he was born here. He beams as he talks about the town's Fourth of July parade, and the new post office. He's full of stories, and pieces of local history.

"This is the old Pumish house," he says as he slows down on a quiet, residential street. "This is a small town, you know. They say 'The Pumish girls used to live there.' Well, they did. But that was one that actually survived the 1918 fire. And that became the unofficial hospital right after the fire because it was one of the biggest buildings left standing."

Paul Olson waves to every driver he passes. He says his big city brother was visiting a while back. His brother asked him, "Do you know everybody in this town?"

Downtown Moose Lake is one block long, and one block wide. There's a bank, and a credit union, and a jazzy new coffee shop. Paul Olson parks his truck, and before he's even out of the door, a woman stops on the sidewalk. She's looking at Olson with a big smile on her face.

"Hi, Peggy, how are you?" Paul asks as he steps onto the sidewalk.

She's a cook at the school, and they haven't seen each other for while. They talk about the school, and about Paul's new job, and about the Olson family getting ready to move back into their house, now that the fire repair is almost finished. The talk for a couple minutes.

Paul Olson says this is typical. When he goes to the grocery store, he sees dozens of people he knows. He says it's one of the best parts of living in a town with 2,000 people.

Shelly Olson agrees. She says it's wonderful - most of the time. But it has drawbacks.

"It's a blessing and a curse of a small town that everybody knows everything about everybody. " - Paul Olson of Moose Lake, Minn.

"There's a lot of people, ourselves included, that know a lot about other people's business whether you want to or not," she says. "That's just the way a small town is. And if you do something that somebody considers out of line, it's talked about, and I don't think anybody - or very few people - mean any harm in that. It's just that everybody knows everybody."

Paul Olson says he used to hear stories about himself.

"When I was single, before Shelly and I got married," he says, "I heard about all the girls I was dating. And I wasn't dating half of them."

He says it can be annoying to be the focus of gossip. Everyone knows everyone else's business. In spite of that, he says people in Moose Lake are pretty tolerant of neighbors who don't quite fit the mold.

"I liken it to a family," he says. "It's like knowing Uncle Bob is kind of the flunky of the family. It can be very accepting. Even though you're different or you might have an odd way of doing things, people say, 'That's just the way it is,' and they kind of laugh it off. The perfect way of saying this is, it's a blessing and a curse of a small town that everybody knows everything about everybody."

Paul and Shelly Olson say they miss out on some things because their town is so small. There isn't a lot of variety. There is only a handful of restaurants instead of hundreds. Shopping is pretty limited. There is one movie theater. But Paul Olson says there's a surprising variety of people in Moose Lake.

He says the Olson kids know their elderly neighbors, and they talk to them at the grocery store. In contrast, when he was a kid in Bloomington, his parents were the oldest people he knew. He says everyone in his neighborhood had similar houses, similar hobbies, and similar jobs. It's not that way in Moose Lake.

"We have doctors that are living in Moose Lake," he says. "We also have people that are living off food stamps trying to make ends meet at whatever job they can do. And you know what? Most people know the names of both of those people. And they interact with both those people."

	Andy, 8, and Dana, 6, are Shelly and Paul Olson's children. (MPR Photo/Chris Julin)

That's a small town experience, Paul Olson says. It's not like that in the suburbs.

"You're not going to see the food stamp person shopping at Byerly's, more than likely," he says. "You're also probably not going to be living next to the neurosurgeon because she, or he, is probably going to have a house in a different part of the city. So we get the opportunity of seeing a nice microcosm, to some degree, of America."

Shelly Olson shakes her head in disagreement. She says the town has very little cultural diversity.

"If you're looking for a bunch of Finns and Norwegians, Moose Lake is the place to come. They're great people. But you know, it's not like people of other cultures are coming in droves to live here," says Shelly.

"There's not a lot of cultural diversity here, and it's something that we're concerned about as future parents of a child from Colombia. It has crossed our mind that this child is definitely going to feel in the minority. I can't think of more than maybe a handful of kids in our elementary school that have something besides Scandinavian background," Shelly says.

Shelly and Paul Olson are getting ready to go to Colombia to meet their new adopted child. They say the family will be making more trips to the Twin Cities. They want their new child to spend time with people who aren't of Scandinavian stock.

But they won't mind making the drive. They already go to the city to visit the zoo, or to hear a band, or go to a football game. They say it's okay to drive a couple hours once in a while for those things. They're happy that every day in Moose Lake they can take a walk on a quiet country road. They can open their windows and "hear frogs peeping instead of cars beeping." They can run downtown, anytime, and get a free parking space.