As I may have mentioned before, I live in a really small town. Our center of town is tiny, a crossroads consisting of a library, a church, a post office and a few stores. It is quintessential New England town square bounded by war monuments and historical markers. White clapboard steeples, one on the church, the other on the old town hall,look across the old village green at the public library converted from a grain shed and the peeling paint of the old farmhouse that is the post office.

I could compare it to Norman Rockwell  but that would not fully capture the rambling, modern nature of life in this corner New England. For starters, it’s not that rural, although my town is remote. There are no supermarkets in our town, the closest one to my house is over seven miles away. There isn’t much “running to the store,” around here. It also makes one very dependent upon having a car. Boston, however, is about an hour away, and exudes it’s intellectual force for many miles. In other words, it may be rural, but it is not backwards.