Tag: small towns

The truth is, the Amish have had to adapt and innovate and negotiate the changing world. The truth is, the Amish are a people of imagination. Perhaps not “imagination” as popularly conceived but imagination nevertheless.

As populations and employments shift, the South reflects transitions affecting the nation as a whole. Wherever we are, the place around us is changing. Yet it also has a history of its own.

Today the man described as “Issaquah’s Thoreau” is largely forgotten. His books have been out of print for years and the anniversary of what would have been his 100th birthday in 2020 passed without a single mention in any local newspapers. An unfitting end for a man who poured so much soul into his writing about a small place he loved. In truth, in an era when more and more books and media are exclusively focused on the national and international, Petite’s focus on the local scale of life is not only refreshing but downright astounding.

Here are three novels about three places in the world. Each conveys not just a perfunctory setting but a web of topography, livelihoods, pastimes, and lore. And in each the experience of arriving at that place endures in memory and self-understanding.

Neither Columbiana nor Sewickley perfectly realize the role of Cram’s ideal walled town, but Sewickley comes much closer. While not perfect, it offers a real-world example of an economically vibrant, urban community.

Was the experience of “community” in an Ohio town during Ervin’s lifetime fundamentally more compelling and authentic than has been possible after the post-war economic boom? Or should Ervin’s passion for organizing and social service be seen as an attempt to compensate for an actual fragility of communal life?

You just do it, and you do it because you know your place is a wonderful place and you want to keep it the way it is. It’s not because you want so-and-so to be like, “Oh, there’s pastor’s wife picking up Wordi Gras trash.” It becomes second nature after a while. It needs to be, I saw it, so now it’s my job.

This is a description of small-town life and the help you can expect to receive from people not conditioned to give strangers the finger.

The stones strapped to the back of the city dweller, along with the thick tension of the silence of the state, explains why most city conversations fall on the opposite side of friendly.

Their language is hopeful and would be recognizable to any tobacco farmer of the last hundred years. But now they are talking about food.