Jerry Mevissen doesn't golf. He doesn't drink scotch. He doesn't watch TV.
So there are at least a few things that Mevissen does not do in retirement.
Now here's a partial list of things he does do: write books, tend Haflinger horses and Scottish Highland cattle, plant apple trees, raise chickens, split wood (seven cords last October), socialize in his small-town community and gaze out at the Crow Wing River from the 21-foot span of windows in the home he built on its shore.
"I'll tell you what, it is the way to go," said Mevissen with characteristic enthusiasm.
Mevissen was a "young boy" of 55 in 1987, when he retired after a 36-year career in marketing at Honeywell. "As much as I loved my job — and I did love my job — I lived for a living and I worked at Honeywell to live," Mevissen, now 82, likes to say.
Now he could pursue full-time living. His then-wife wanted to move into the city, but Mevissen wanted to go the opposite direction — he had grown up in Elk River and wanted to be out in the country again. So they went their separate ways, and Mevissen wound up buying 50 acres of land with half a mile of riverfront near Nimrod, Minn., 160 miles northeast of the Twin Cities.
Mevissen "fell in love with that place" for a lot of reasons, but mainly for its 68 residents. "The river got me there, but the people kept me there. They're wonderful, wonderful people."
Small-town Minnesota residents — seemingly ordinary folks leading quietly complex lives — have been the focus of his writing from the get-go. A friend died, a man who had cleared Mevissen's property to make way for his house, and he wrote a moving eulogy for the funeral. That prompted the editor of the local paper, the Sebeka Menahga Review Messenger, to offer him a job.
