I was talking to The Whistler recently about my purchase of a new house (we close next week on Wed. and the wait is killing me) and he told me that when he bought his house the moment he was most excited about was the part where the old owner handed him the keys.  The funny thing was when his closing day arrived the old owner...didn’t have any keys for his house.  He hadn’t locked it up in years and didn’t know where they were at.

Upon hearing that something dawned on me: I don’t have any keys for my old house either.  I guess I’ve never really felt like I had to lock my house up.  The few times we have gone out of town for any significant amount of time we’d lock the front doors but left a back patio door open so we could get back in.

I’ll either have to get some new ones made or have a similar moment with the people who eventually buy the house from me.  But the larger reality - that North Dakotans generally live in communities so safe that a lot of them don’t even feel like they need to lock up their homes - is a comforting one.