It has been nearly a year now since I ventured south to take the news editor's job at the Herald. And, as with every place I've lived, I have some good memories and some good stories.

My first move out of state, in 1968, took me to Memphis, Tenn. where I learned that the poetic lines that talk about the hum or vibrant sound of cicadas is really a deafening, frightening, irritating sound. Another lesson was the lesson of intolerance in America when Martin Luther King was shot.

Swimming in the lakes and rivers in Memphis is unheard of -- water moccasins inhabit them.

But what a thrill it was to see cotton fields just like I'd read about in geography. The cotton spills out of the bowls which become razor-sharp as they dry.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I lived in the Lahontan Valley in Nevada. It's an amazing part of the United States that most people only think of as the 'gambling mecca' and uninhabitable outside of the casinos and Lake Tahoe. Not so.

The desert does bloom after a rain and mustangs run wild through the valleys. Sitting on a mountain, listening to coyotes and watching herds of mustang on a moonlit night still leaves an impression. Cattle rustling was still a hanging offense and cowboys trekked into town with their rifles displayed in the back windows of their pickup trucks.

The land is dry -- blistered and cracked under white hot sun.

There is no smell as pungent and heady as sagebrush when it blossoms after a spring rain. Those same rains can rearrange a town with torrents of water that careen off the mountains, running a race to the valley over baked-hard ground.

Charleston, S.C. was my home for four years in the mid-1970s. I saw the ocean for the first time. I collected sand dollars, visited old plantations, saw tobacco drying sheds and my first water spout on the ocean. Deep sea fishing is a hoot. I drug up fish from 300 feet down. We used double hooks and brought up two red snappers at a time. They felt like Moby Dick on the end of my line.

In the late 1970s, I moved back to Minnesota -- home.

I was fortunate to live a couple of those years in Silver Bay, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. It is breathtaking. The sounds of quiet were a companion to the smell of the lake in my front yard and pine trees and miles of woods in my back yard. Foghorns stood guard at night when the silence was too much to bear.

Ice fogs sparkled on winter mornings and fishers, moose, wolves and bear roamed in and out of my yard. It is a hunter and fisherman's paradise.

Austin will be my last residence in Minnesota for the foreseeable future. I will remember the diversity of cultures, lunch at El Mariachi's, and the Mill Pond trail on a warm summer evening. The Herald staff, who have been my family for the past year, especially Ross, Sheila and Jaime, will be sorely missed.

I have taken a job with a newspaper in Pennsylvania and will be moving soon.

Until my next adventure back to Minnesota, thanks for the memories.

Ailene Dawson's column has appeared on Wednesdays for the past year. She bids you all adieu.