Some Interesting Demographics

I live in a really small town in Northern Maine called Van Buren (yes, it's named after Martin Van Buren, the 8th President of the United States, and no, no one in town knows anything else about him).

Van Buren is situated right on the border across from New Brunswick, one of the French Canadian provinces. I can literally walk across the street into Canada, and it's likely that the customs official will be one of my former high school teachers. The population of the town (not including moose) is about 3,000 and shrinking. When my sister graduated from V.B.D.S.S (the local high school) 12 years ago, her graduating class had 108 people. My class had only 35 (although I wasn't one of them, but that's another story and will be told at another time).

The major occupation of the area is potato farming. Someone once compiled a book of local recipes; when I flipped through it once I was surprised to find foods as strange-sounding as "potato doughnuts" and "potato candy".

Anyway, I hope you can get at least a hazy idea of what life is like in an extremely rural area (I can't believe I grew up here!) of these United States.