Small Towns Have Big Hearts
Christmas decorations are up all around town and the big old star atop the grain elevator has been turned on for the holidays. It’s beautiful at night with the snow swirling around it.
Half-a-block down, just this side of the filling station, folks have decorated the new village Christmas tree. The old one, a 40-foot pine that we all loved, was cut down to make way for three parking spaces when the new bank moved to town.
“It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” crackles through the tinny speaker hanging outside the dime store and there’s a handwritten sign in the cafe window announcing Santa will be there from 2 until 5 on Saturday afternoon with presents for the kids.
Norman Rockwell never painted our village and Hallmark hasn’t immortalized us on any of its twofor-a-buck holiday cards, but it really doesn’t seem to matter much to us that we’re not picturesque. This is as good as it gets and as an inspired Tom Lehrer once sang, “… what the hell, it’s home!”
Most of the businesses are giving away calendars again this year and as usual, the beauty parlor is booked through New Year’s Eve with everyone wanting to get prettied up for one reason or another.
There are no flowers hanging beside the funeral home door so the good news is nobody died overnight.
A few folks are spending their first Christmas alone; death and divorce take a toll even in our tiny village. We lost a few old friends this year and we’ll miss them, but a couple of new families with small children moved in so it kind of evens things out.
One of the newcomers said he moved here because he wanted to live in a town where the local high school could still publish a football schedule and play night games. A place where it was safe for kids to walk to and from the stadium.
His stories of the violence that caused high schools in his city to keep their games a secret shocked us. We’d never heard of a place where the opposing teams had to be loaded onto buses and furtively driven to an unannounced location to play so the gang-garbage wouldn’t show up and turn the game into a bloodbath.
Tales like that remind us of how good we’ve got it. Life around here is pretty quiet, and that’s just the way we like it. Gives us time to stop and smell the mistletoe, you might say.
Small town folks just don’t require much in the way of excitement. Don’t want it, either. In fact, today’s big news is that Mrs. Oller up at the cafe is making egg salad sandwiches and vegetable soup for lunch.
This afternoon I’ll probably take a walk uptown and make the rounds. I like to see if the display in the furniture store show window has changed. Every couple of weeks a batch of blue La-Z-Boy recliners replaces the usual brown ones. Since it’s near Christmas they’re probably showing both.
This morning I ran into Emmy in front of the barber shop. She told me she’d finished the alterations on my old brown wool dress.
Emmy and her husband Louis came here in the late ‘50s from a little town near Stuttgart, Germany. She’s a world-class seamstress but doesn’t sew much since Louis died last year. She did learn to drive though and goes bowling with the church league on Saturday nights.
Tonight there’s a get-together at Mary’s. Steve’s making shrimp gumbo and Sharon’s bringing pies. We’ll eat too much and maybe watch a movie. Mostly we’ll all just be glad to be there.
And here.
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