Life In A Small Town

The other day I kind of had a little surreal moment. I'd just gotten out of my car and was heading into the grocery store where I work. Two locals that I know fairly well were passing each other as one went in and the other came out, and they called out a quick greeting. Then on their way they went.

Y'all... This was a Mayberry moment. (And if you don't know what Mayberry is, I can't help you.) Though, if I'm being honest, sometimes my town has more of a weird, less entertaining Stars Hollow vibe.

For some context, my town is in a county of Michigan that was hit hard by an ice storm at the end of March. Thankfully, I was in a much warmer place when the full brunt of that ice storm came down on us. My kids weren't. Ori and the cats were waiting for us in a dark house without power. The cousin we had staying with them said that she was standing outside with the dogs (ours and hers) and she could hear the trees falling in the swamp behind the house. Most of my community have likened it to a war zone.

I saw the pictures. I watched the videos from neighboring counties. I know what I came home to. I absolutely believe them.

Power outages lasted for days (in many cases, a week or more). My work was overrun with people who'd lost entire freezers' worth of food and was lined up for hours with those looking to get gas for generators. Most of those people weren't even locals. They were from a couple of towns hit much harder than ours. At one point they had one single gas station that had a generator ... and it ran out of fuel. So they came south to get just a little bit of the resources they could to make it through. At one point, we also ran out of fuel ... right about the time our tanker pulled into the parking lot. For some reason, this slooooooooowwweed the pumps way down, and even after 4 separate reset attempts, it took you almost thirty minutes to get thirty gallons of gas. The pumps had been so overworked that day, that they could not physically keep up and the air pocket from having run dry and then had new fuel poured in on top of it just about ended them.

The past couple of weeks have been ... incredible and ridiculous all at the same time.

So, when you think of towns like Mayberry and Stars Hollow, you think of the fictional camaraderie between the neighbors. You enjoy how they might needle one another and get on each other's nerves, but they're overall good, decent people that want everyone around them to thrive. They're also more than willing to jump in and help take care of business.

We mostly have that. I know people around here that would not only help me hide a body, but will set up a full week's worth of alibis if I thought I should need it. These are the people that brought friends and neighbors into town to get supplies after their vehicles were barricaded in by fallen trees and branches. These are the people that realized the person in front of them didn't have cash on them when our internet went down and we couldn't take cards and happily handed over a few dollars. In so many ways, this community that I'm a part of is steadfast about taking care of one another.

I swear, though, some of these same people could start a bitching contest with a brick wall. Some of them will always find something to complain about, even if it's either a) a non-issue or b) the same problem literally everyone else is already dealing with. For point a, most of us just ignore them. They're not adding anything to our lives, so why pay them any mind. When you get to whining about point b, however, you can rile up a whole damn town. Leads to some fascinating comments sections on FB, though.

One other way we are very much not like Mayberry or Stars Hollow or any other fictional small town was best described to me by a local one night. (Paraphrasing because retail apparently murders your memory.) "It amazes me how so many people are just so ready to screw over their neighbor."

In that context, he was talking about his jobs being way underbid by other local companies that then go on to add extra charges prior to delivering the bill to customers. I'm not sure if he was referring to how they try to screw him over by underbidding a valuable service, or how they then cheat the customer by adding things after the quote has been given. Either way, it's shitty behavior and a poor business practice. It's also a practice that is unfortunately common in many small towns. Especially those like ours that are in a particularly low-income area. Where every job could be the difference between having food on the table or not, it's definitely a dog-eat-dog environment. This is the kind of thing that breeds resentment and, yes, weird little feuds that can/will/have involved the entire community. Which means a lot less of that nurturing/standing together kind of vibe we see on television.

Having grown up watching Gilmore Girls, I can't tell you how often I wished our little corner of the world was as supportive, less judgmental, and appropriately and wonderfully weird as it was portrayed in Stars Hollow. But that day, walking into the grocery store, I felt it. That weird, strange niggling that these are my people, these are their ticks, their weird little habits, and mostly how they fit into the community I'm a part of.

In recent years, I resigned myself to the fact that I was never leaving here. (Because I just had to go and fall in love with a stupid boy. insert eye roll emoji here) After making peace with reality, I decided that if I wanted things to change, then I would have to be a part of changing things. Which meant getting more involved. But that's a conversation for another post.

For this one, I'll end with this: don't blind yourself to the faults of your community, but don't absolve yourself of the responsibility for changing it. If you live there, then it's on you, too.