Life can be great in a small town. Of course, I’m biased; I grew up in a small rural community, and after spending several decades in a big city – Denver – I’m back in a small rural community now. There’s something great about going into the post office and knowing the first names of at least half the people you run into inside. There’s something great about knowing the one or two people – every small community has them – who know everybody and everything that’s going on. We all live in each other’s hip pockets, and yeah, it’s not for everybody, but my wife and I love life in our little Susitna Valley community.
The other neat thing about small towns is how they will pitch in to help one another. Case in point: Chelsea, Michigan, a town of about 5,300. Serendipity Books, a Chelsea bookstore that has been in business since 1997, was moving to a new location only a block away. So 300 local folks showed up to help, and the way they found to do it was, well, remarkable.
Residents of all ages in a small Michigan community formed a human chain and helped a local bookshop move each of its 9,100 books — one by one — to a new storefront about a block away.
The “book brigade” of around 300 people stood in two lines running along a sidewalk in downtown Chelsea on Sunday, passing each title from Serendipity Books’ former location directly to the correct shelves in the new building, down the block and around the corner on Main Street.
“It was a practical way to move the books, but it also was a way for everybody to have a part,” Michelle Tuplin, the store’s owner, said. “As people passed the books along, they said ‘I have not read this’ and ‘that’s a good one.’”
Momentum had been building since Tuplin announced the move in January.
“It became so buzzy in town. So many people wanted to help,” she said Tuesday.
It sounds efficient; the books went from shelf to shelf, all in good order.
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One Chelsea resident and employee of the bookstore, Kacy Friss, said:
“It’s a small town and people just really look out for each other,” said Kaci Friss, 32, who grew up in Chelsea and has worked at the bookstore for a little over a year. “Anywhere you go, you are going to run into someone you know or who knows you, and is going to ask you about your day.”
Plenty of small towns are like that. And it’s not just an American thing. Some years ago, while working in Japan, I took a Saturday afternoon and rode up the rail line to a little town called Konan, got off, and walked around for a while. I have a vivid memory of three old guys, sitting on the wooden steps of what looked like a drug store; each of the old boys had a can of beer, each of them had a cigarette, and the three of them were just sitting on the steps in the sunshine, shooting the breeze; but for their ethnicity, language and clothing, they looked just like the old guys who used to sit on the wooden steps of Peterson’s General Store in Highlandville, a village about five miles “upstream” from my folks’ place.
I have no idea about Chelsea’s politics or the politics of the people who run that bookstore. And, I don’t care. Sometimes it’s good enough to forget all that for a moment and appreciate a small town getting something done in a typically small-town way – neighbors helping neighbors. We could do with a lot more of that.
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