There have been a lot of changes in Blue Earth and Faribault County in the last 18 years. Some good, some not so good.

I chose the number of years to be 18, as that is how long I have lived here.

When you move to a new location, the way it looks at that moment becomes your point of reference. That is true if you are even just visiting a new place.

The town might be 150 years and gone through many changes over those years, both in growth and in decline. But you only have that starting point of when you arrived.

Plenty of things have happened in Blue Earth before I came here to live. The list is almost endless. The year before I moved here Blue Earth celebrated its 150th year of existence – its Sesquicentennial, since it was created in 1856.

I remember coming to Blue Earth and driving and walking around and being very impressed with all of the businesses in this city. Pretty much every building had a business in it, not hardly any empty ones. Unless you count those infamous Three Sisters, which did have something inside.

There were three pharmacies (one in Walmart) and two hardware stores, furniture store, two dentists, big hospital, two dollar stores, farm store and a whole lot more. There were so many it is difficult to remember them all. Some are still here, some are not.

Then there were industries here, something not always found in cities this size.

So, my reference point is the year 2007. Maybe you were born here and your reference point is your whole life. You remember back to when there were even more businesses downtown including clothing stores, movie theaters and even stores like J.C. Penney.

But, time passes, and things change. Nothing, even towns, remain the same.

And sadly, for small towns, that change can often be loss of business and decrease in population. That is true in Faribault County, as well as many areas in the Midwest.

But it is not all gloom and doom. New businesses do start up. People do still move to small towns, sometimes from the big cities, and sometimes they even come here from California and Florida – and not just the other way around.

We have tried at the Register to focus on the positive, and you may have noticed that we have labeled an ongoing series of stories ‘Faribault County Business Happenings.’ Those stories have been about new businesses opening up across the county, or big changes at some current businesses. We have done nearly a dozen of those in the past year or two, and we are already planning another couple of them for this year. It seems that despite everything else, people are still very interested in starting up a new business in a small town.

And, that is pretty good news.

But sometimes the news is not always good. The story this week about Healey Homes is one of those. We debated running the story without more information, but in the end we ran the story with what information we know.

It is not the first time a business closed in the county with not much information being released. Sometimes a business has been open one day and literally closed the next. No warning, no explanation and no going out of business sale. Just closed.

I get it. It is not good news. And people want to keep their personal business personal.

However, when a business employs a significant number of people, and owns some significant amount of property in the city, and services a significant number of people, that translates into the public deserving at least some explanation.

It has happened a lot lately, in Blue Earth as well as the other towns in Faribault County.

A business just closes, sometimes over a weekend or even sometimes overnight.

Our industry of small-town newspapers is certainly not immune from this kind of situation. Newspapers are shutting down, and there are way fewer newspapers in Minnesota than there were 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Sometimes that is due to the towns they serve shrinking, both in population and number of businesses.

Hopefully, both small towns and newspapers are going to survive into the future. I am sure they will, but I am also certain that the one thing that never changes is that everything is going to change. Nothing stays the same forever.

For now, the key is still to support what we do have. Our local businesses, our hospital and schools, our small towns, and, of course, your local newspaper.

You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you. Yes, it is important to support your town and its newspaper.

But I will add one more thing – once again, thanks for reading us.