The lights dimmed, the projector switch flipped. A hot plastic smell wafted through the room as the clickity-clack of a Super 8 home movie began. Hubby and I were returning from our Yellowstone honeymoon, but had stopped in at my grandparents’ before embarking on the last leg of our journey home to Cloquet.

I had grown up here in this small, rural town, before my dad’s job plucked us out of the familiar black soil of North Dakota, transplanting us into the foreign red ore of the Iron Range. I was 14, introverted, and did not take the move well. I wept for weeks, maybe months, in scared...