Archives

You are currently viewing archive for November 2008
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville

26/11: Small Towns

Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Paul Gregory Alms, a Lutheran minister in Catawba, North Carolina (population 700) has a wonderful post on small towns over at the First Things blog:

Excerpts:

In many ways, they are exactly like the rest of America. People in them watch CNN and Fox news. They have cable and satellite television and high-speed Internet connections. Kids play the same video games and wear the same fashions. But there is one distinctiveness here, and a single word captures much of it: connectedness. To live in a small town is to be connected, and not electronically or digitally. Rather it means to be connected to people in the flesh, to actual places, to land and buildings, to a common past.

....

People are often born, grow up, marry, raise a family, work, retire, and die all within the same few miles or even acres. Birth, childhood, family, place, memory, and death are all tied tightly together. These few acres or miles are a part of daily experience. You drive by the place where you grew up every day. It is the same with the place where you went to school or played baseball or where your granddaddy used to work. The past is not past in a small town. The past is experienced viscerally and concretely every day. It is a part of today as surely as the ground upon which one walks.

...

Land and family inevitably bring one in contact with the past. The past lives here in ways that are inconceivable elsewhere. To go to the grocery store is to potentially encounter your entire past life and even ancestry: your grandmother, your first grade teacher, your girlfriend from high school, your cousin, your boss from years ago. When one lives in the place where one was raised and when that place is small and self contained, the past is its own character in the drama of life. Memories are resurrected often and in many ways. The memories are also associated with place: a childhood accident there, your grandfather’s farm there, a marriage proposal there. All of it is just around the bend. People in small towns do not escape the past by moving to some other place. They confront it daily. They inhabit it.