Small Town

I called this place the Small Town because it was a good blind term, and also, it is small... sort of. Small is a subjective measure; your small might be different from mine. So, here's the truth of this Small Town: we are 19,000 people with two roads in and out who exist on a small spit of land with water all around us. Many of us don't have driveways. Most of us consider an 1/8 of acre to be a "decent" backyard. We can hear each other from our kitchens. We can see each other all the time. It's like a tiny campus, cramped with all the kids that fill up a giant school.

Because of this "closeness," we are in equal measure tightly bound and in love with one another and incredibly nasty to each at the same time. We come together when a kid is sick, or the pizza place burns, but most of the time, like most of the world, we pick sides and get snarky. Until it snows. We're the best to each other when it snows!

Thing is: it hasn't snowed lately in a big way, not in two years or so, and I'm not complaining, but yeah. We're all good to one another in a snowstorm.

When it snowed yesterday, a bitchy insult to injury kind of crappy snow, I figured we were all done for. Masked up, smile-less, eyes shifty and standing so far apart, I thought that after five or six weeks of this new life, the levy might break. The pitch forks felt sharpened to me; the nasty typewriters seemed oiled up. 

Today, I took the GSYO to pick up his bike (shuttered in another garage for a month).

The sun was out; the shitty snow was long gone. The sky seemed brighter than normal.

Driving was scary! Dodge this neighbor, dodge that one. 

The streets were lined with beach chairs and coolers, all at the end of their driveways, all shouting across the street, or over the way, across the grass. Responsibly distant each.

The old rules were long gone; booze is now allowed in public, I guess. The Yankee solitude has been replaced by this everyday snowstorm of quarantine I suppose... where we all wave to one another, pitch in, dig out, drink at the end of our driveways after a long exhausting day. The Small Town is cranky at times, too small in ways at other times, but today, it looked like a healthy and happy future. 

As the pollution lifts across the world, as the animals in our absence find their way, so do we, in Rome, in Barcelona, in NYC, or San Fran or ever even here, in this Small Town in the middle of a pandemic surge: masked, separated, together. 

I hope our Small Town is like yours. Brave, new, safe, responsible, but connected still.

Helpful. Kind. Waving and chatting. Shoveling the shit.