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caa0b68
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Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go and nothing to buy...and no money to buy it with.
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south
small-town
summer
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Harper Lee |
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7a64f44
|
It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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homecoming
small-town
nostalgia
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Walker Percy |
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1d3c16b
|
This was a normal town once, and we were normal people. Most of us worked at the plastics factory on the outskirts of town. Then one day there was an accident... something escaped from the factory, a yellow gas. It floated over the town so fast that we didn't see it, didn't realize... and then it was too late, and Dark Falls wasn't a normal town anymore.
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grief
murder
people
death
dark-falls
factory
living-dead
plastics
townsfolk
yellow
gas
creepy
pollution
small-town
zombie
normal
poison
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R.L. Stine |
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b7348b0
|
Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.
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south-carolina
spring
small-town
nostalgia
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Pat Conroy |
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b3afb09
|
Knowledge is currency here....
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|
village
small-town
knowledge
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Joanne Harris |
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efd305b
|
Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on... places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills... a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.
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photography
earth
television
future
past
love
cook-stove
glow
laundry
traditional
nikon
kodak
kodachrome
cell-phone
farm
pie
massachusetts
grim
country
digital
missing
nostalgic
small-town
film
peace
texting
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Rebecca McNutt |
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c7d6317
|
[He] had to submit to the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where many tongues talk but few heads think.
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les-misérables
small-town
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Victor Hugo |
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bb6b4ba
|
"Wendy's house, unlike many in Cape Breton, had three floors, along with a basement and attic. Aside from Wendy's bedroom, there was a laundry room. The dirty water in the sink would rush from the washer hose, bubbling up, threatening to overflow, but it never did. Next-door was a motel with a neon sign that read in turquoise and pink, "We have the best rates in town!", but the 'E' in 'rates' kept flickering on and off day and night so that every few seconds it would switch to, "We have the best rats in town!"
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|
funny
bedroom
bubble
inn
laundry-room
motel
quaint
rates
sink
cape-breton
sydney
best
turquoise
neon
canada
odd
weird
rat
hotel
small-town
poor
house
rats
strange
pink
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
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589c0cd
|
"A scattering of pinpoint lights shows up in the blackness ahead. A town or village straddling the highway. The indicator on the speedometer begins to lose ground. The man glances in his mirror at the girl, a little anxiously as if this oncoming town were some kind of test to be met. An illuminated road sign flashes by: CAUTION! MAIN STREET AHEAD - SLOW UP The man nods grimly, as if agreeing with that first word. But not in the way it is meant. The lights grow bigger, spread out on either side. Street lights peer out here and there among the trees. The highway suddenly sprouts a plank sidewalk on each side of it. Dark store-windows glide by. With an instinctive gesture, the man dims his lights from blinding platinum to just a pale wash. A lunch-room window drifts by. ("Jane Brown's Body")"
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small-town
small-town-life
small-towns
night
|
Cornell Woolrich |
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8f8351f
|
Another historical peculiarity of the place was the fact that its large mansions, those relics of another time, had not been reconstructed to serve as nursing homes for that vast population of comatose and the dying who were kept alive, unconscionably, through trailblazing medical invention.
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new-england
small-town
|
John Cheever |
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4777132
|
"I wish I could run away," Rudger told Jersey as they both rushed in and out of various patients' rooms, darting around like little ants. "I can't leave and be on my own though, not right now, anyway." "Why?" asked Jersey, waving her flashlight in mid-air. Rudger froze for a second, a regretful haze emanating from his eyes. "It'd break her heart if I left." "Ain't that normal? For parents to have mixed feelings about their kids growin' up?" "Not for me, it isn't." Jersey made a pitying face in his direction. "So, you wanna keep bein' towed around with your mom, livin' in a gross town like Danvers?" "Is there a choice?" "Yeah, there sure is. You can run away and try to be a whole person before it's too late, or you can live with mommy dearest forever and turn into Norman Bates."
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rebellion
friendship
backwater
danvers-state
heaert-heartbreak
mommy
norman-bates
runaway
rural
teen-roance
mental-hospital
emotional
small-town
parent
normal
gross
drama
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Rebecca McNutt |