Years ago, when we were just graduating from college, Quinn and I had a choice: Washington, D.C., or New York? In Washington he’d been offered a fine, upstanding job as a legislative aide to a U.S. senator; he would wear suits every day and work in an office next to the Capitol building. In New York, he would have a … Read More
Love Where You Live experiment: Go to a parade
It’s Wednesday night, dinnertime, and I’m weaving at top speed through the back roads of Blacksburg, trying to make it downtown before the snare drums do. Cranking my window down as I parallel park, I cock an ear. Are they coming? Is that a distant brass section or just the complaints of Main Street traffic? Finally jammed into a mostly … Read More
Three Reasons Why It’s Hard to Vote in Local Elections—and Why I’ll Vote Anyway
One of the fundamental premises of loving where you live is this: If you love your town, you do what’s good for it. Except the bummer part is that what’s good for our town usually requires the kind of effort most of us would prefer not to have to make. Take voting, for instance. You have to do some preliminary … Read More
How 800 residents of Powell, Wyoming, opened a store together
In 2002, when the last clothing store shut down in the ranching town of Powell, Wyoming, the 5,300 residents feared for the future of their Main Street, which was already disintegrating into a gap-toothed ghost town of shuttered storefronts and struggling shops. A Super Walmart had just passed them up for nearby Cody; wouldn’t everyone drive over there for their … Read More