What Makes a Small Town Feel Like Home? 10 Stories About Business, Community and Belonging (Season One Wrap-Up)

When I recorded the first episode of Small Town Stories, I thought I knew what this show was about. I was gonna go looking for the stories behind small town businesses and the people who built them. Ten conversations later, I don't think that's what I found at all. And I certainly didn't expect where those stories would lead me.

Welcome to Small Town Stories, the podcast exploring the business behind Main Streets and the people shaping small towns across Canada, the U.S., and beyond. I'm Jan Ditchrow, top-right podcast host, marketer, and small town local.

And every Thursday, we're diving into honest conversations about entrepreneurship, creativity, marketing, reinvention, and what it really takes to build something meaningful in a small town today. From local storefronts to growing brands, community builders to nationally recognized names, this is where modern business meets small town life. Let's get into it. Well, hello, and welcome back to Small Town Stories.

I'm your host, Jan Ditchfield, and I'm really glad you're here. Today's episode is a special one because we've officially reached the end of our first season. And I've spent a lot of time over the last few weeks thinking about these last 16 episodes and the 10 conversations I had with my guests, and what I wanted to say about them before we wrap things up. When I started making this show, I really did think I knew what I was looking for.

I wanted to understand the business behind Main Street, and I wanted to know why entrepreneurship feels different in a small town, what makes certain businesses last while others don't, and what the people building them understood about doing business in communities where your customers are also your neighbors. And those are absolutely the conversations I started having. But when I went back and listened to them again, in the order I recorded them in, I noticed something I hadn't really noticed while I was making the show.

The questions started changing. Somewhere along the way, we stopped talking only about what makes a business work and started talking about the things happening around those businesses. Why certain places become gathering places, what happens when a community grows and changes, why someone decides to build something that's missing, or put their hand up when something needs doing. What happens to the things we assume will always be here when the people taking care of them eventually aren't?

And none of that happened because I sat down before the season started and decided that was the story I wanted to tell. It happened one conversation at a time. So that's what I want to do with you today. I want to go back to those conversations and the order they happened, because when you put them together, I think they tell a story that none of them could have told on their own.

The first person I sat down with was Eve Clownmates. At that point, I was coming into small town stories very much as the person I've been professionally for most of my adult life. I'm a marketer, I'm a business strategist, I've spent years working in the online space, where we talk endlessly about visibility and growth and positioning and how to reach more people. And I was fascinated by how differently all of that seemed to work once your customers were also the people you ran into at the post office.

Eve had spent decades working with businesses and economic development in small communities. And one of the first things he helped me understand was that you can't separate the business from the place where you're building it. Many of them tend to be there for many, many years. So they are well set in their ways.

So they do see somebody else opening up a business as a little bit of an outsider. They're more starting to see a shift in that with younger entrepreneurs. But certainly the older business people that have been there for many years, particularly in small towns, they tend to have to be more cautious about new arrivals. So that does play a role.

And then the um spending time to visit a possible location that you want to open a business, spend time in the coffee shop, chat with the locals, and you know who they are, because they're going to be there every day at the coffee shop. They're going to be there first thing in the morning before the stores open. And to get a feel for the conversation and to get a feel for the the uh the mechanics, if you wish, within that community, I think is a very good step to understanding as to what could or could not work in the place.

I remember leaving that conversation, thinking about how much of small town business happens outside the business itself. Your reputation is your marketing, the conversations you have before you open matter. The relationships you build matter. How you enter a community matters.

And I think at that point I would have told you that was the lesson. If you want to build a successful business in a small town, you have to understand that you're not simply building a company, you're becoming part of the story of the town itself. I still think that's true. I just didn't understand yet how much bigger the idea was going to become.

My next conversation was with Angelina Rona, and on the surface, it couldn't have been more different. Angie's store in Merrickville is unmistakably Angie. The art, the branding, the experience, the pink none of it could belong to anybody else. We talked about originality and reinvention and how easy it has become, particularly online, for businesses to slowly start looking like every other business around them.

And Angie kept coming back to the importance of being yourself. You're absolutely right. I think, you know, it is very intentional. Um I in fact, you know, when I started this business, I didn't even actually think about branding.

Because I was just, I think you have to be very authentic and honest with yourself about what you're going to do. You have to be very passionate about it. And if you're authentic and real about what you're putting in there, the branding itself just evolves organically. Yes.

You know. For example, I, you know, I of course I paint the little girls, I do all of the pops surrealism. But if even when I paint a floral, people will say, I knew that you painted that. Because I'm in there and they know it, they can feel it, they can see it.

So yeah, I take a lot of pride in the store and how it looks. I love the aesthetic, and it's all me. So I am in itself the brand. What stayed with me after Angie left was the things we remember tend to have someone else's fingerprints on them.

We talk about the identity of a town as though the town somehow developed a personality of its own. But of course it didn't. People made choices. Someone painted something pink, someone opened a gallery, someone restored an old building instead of tearing it down.

Someone decided there was room to do something differently. And enough of those choices, made over enough years, eventually become the way we describe a place. But I was still looking at all of this primarily through the lens of business. And that changed when I sat down with Robin Frederickson.

I've known the village Bean as long as I've been back in Merrickville. It's the coffee shop where you stop for a sandwich and end up staying because someone you know walked through the door. During our conversation, Robin told me about looking up from the back of the shop one day and seeing eight people who had arrived separately sitting at three tables having one conversation. And I remember thinking that you could probably run every business metric in the world on the village bean and still miss what's so important about what keeps happening in that room.

I I feel that way, and that's one of the things that I love most about it is that being that a focal point for the community and a place for people to come together to meet, where you know, you walk in as strangers and leave as friends, a sort of idea. And I think that goes for our locals and sometimes even when you when the tourists come in and they see that dynamic and they think that this is a pretty, a pretty special place. And I always appreciate it and love it when they give us that free that feedback.

Yeah. And just continuing down this path, the the village bean has been described as a heartbeat of the community, and it's it's very on social. You see it and you hear it everywhere. People talk about.

And I'm curious from your perspective, what makes a place become the heartbeat of a town? That's a that's a that's a tough question. I think consistency, I think being there every day, um, being somewhere that is familiar for people where they are seen when they walk in the door, they're recognized. We we know their name, we know their coffee order, um, you know, we know their families, we know where they live.

Um, it's really that familiarity. It's like people walking into their living room or walking into their own kitchen, I think, some some mornings to get their coffee. That's what they're doing when they they come into the coffee shop. And then she told me about Ernie.

He was an older man who didn't have much family around, and he came to the bean regularly, and according to Robin, he was fairly committed to being gruff about it. But every Christmas morning he would put on a nice shirt and come to the bean for breakfast. He might have been sitting at the table by himself, but he wasn't alone. That story has stayed with me.

Absolutely. I I wish I knew the year. I think that we've been doing this since the beginning, uh, if I think about it, but uh we've always done open for breakfast on Christmas Day. And it's if you were to ask me what my favorite day to work is, I will always tell you it's Christmas, it's Christmas Day.

Yeah, it brings me so much, so much joy. It fills my cup being able to be there to be with our community. One Christmas story that really resonates with me was this older gentleman in town, Ernie, that didn't really have uh any family. And he used to come in in the morning and he would always just be so gruff every day.

Good morning, Ernie. What can I get for you today? Dark. I'm like, okay, dark coffee.

Yeah, great, have a good day. And I remember with him one time, I thought he responded with, have a good day too. And I thought, oh my gosh, I won. I broke through.

It's it was a moment, and I was so happy. And he was one gentleman that would come in every Christmas morning while he was alive. He's a few passed away a number of years ago now, but he would come in and he would be dressed up in a nice button-down shirt and nice pair of khaki pants, and he would sit there and have breakfast on his own, but within a restaurant full of people, so he wasn't alone on Christmas Day. And I don't even know if he would have otherwise seen any other people um on Christmas Day.

And so I always felt that we needed to be there for people like him as well. That was probably the first point in this season where I started wondering if I had been measuring the wrong things. Because yes, the bean is a business, it has to make money, it has employees and food costs and all the same realities every other business has. But how do you put value on earning not being alone on Christmas morning?

How do you measure being the place where a child knows they can go if they're lost? Or where someone notices that a regular hasn't been in lately? And Robin eventually put it much more simply than I could. I think that it's more than it's more than the coffee, it's more than what you're what you have to sell, it's about the experience, it's about how you make people feel, if people feel seen, and if people feel comfortable and and want to and want to return and make you part of their daily routine.

You know, that it's a comfortable, uh, a comfortable place for them. I think it's more about how how you make people feel than what you're selling. That changed the question for me. Because now I wasn't only wondering how businesses become part of communities.

I was starting to wonder how much of what we call community is actually being created inside places like these. And once you start thinking about that, the next question it gets a little harder. What happens when the place itself begins to change? My conversation with Nick Previsic was about growing in Merrickville.

Although by the time we finished talking, I don't really think it was about development at all. Nick had become involved because he was concerned that individual decisions were being made without enough consideration of their combined effect. One development might make sense on its own, so might the next one. But what happens when you put all of those decisions together?

And underneath all of the conversations about roads and infrastructure and housing was a much more human question. What are we actually trying to preserve? If we strip away the politics, though, and the zoning bylaws and the council meetings and all the debates, what is it that you hope communities never lose? A way of life.

Yeah. You know, um, I mean, we uh we're privileged in this small community um that provides our services, um, our transportation is relatively simple and straightforward. We live in a beautiful community. We have tourists that come here and they love the village, and we love that they come here.

Um, tourism is probably the largest single business within the community. But the way of life in a small community where you know your neighbors, you help your neighbors, uh, and they help you. Um you can uh provide input to the municipal office whenever you feel like it. Um you know who your counselor is, you know who the mayor is.

Um and it's just it's a way of living together that is really extraordinary and important. It's how do we preserve our way of life? Doesn't mean it doesn't have to change, it can get better. Um but there's a basic sort of core uh group of activities and and belief systems and values that we cherish here, and we want to maintain those.

I love that answer because it doesn't ask a small town to freeze itself in time. Things change, people move in, people move out, businesses open and close, new houses get built. The places we love aren't museums, and I don't think most of us want them to be. But Nick made me think about intentionality.

If every decision leaves a fingerprint on a place, then the future character of a community isn't accidental either. Which means we have some agency in what happens next. And nobody I spoke with this season embodied that idea quite like Kirsten Levy. When I met Kirsten, Rustic Roots had gone from an idea for a farm stand to her full-time business in less than a year.

She wasn't a marketer, she wasn't a farmer, she didn't come from business, she had been a nurse. And when she didn't know how to do something, she figured it out. Again, like community is my big thing. I have lots of other vendors when I go to shows saying, Oh, come out to Ottawa, come out to Kingston, come out hours away.

And that's not my business model. My business model is my community, my neighbors. Um, so I stay to the local area. Usually the furthest I go is Kempville, Brockville, Perth, um, maybe even Carleton Place.

So that's kind of like the area that I stick close to. I want our neighbors to be there. Um, I don't want to have multiple different stores and everything where right now I'm currently mostly a bakery. Um, whereas like I don't want to have a bunch of stores.

I don't want to have people that work for me. Um, I want this to stay rustic roots. I want it to be the farm stand. Um, so for now, rustic roots is gonna stay at the farm.

Um, we're gonna stay a farm stand. You know, the most I might get is opening up like a little bakery at the farm. Um, but again, that's it's my community that I focus on. But the part that became much more interesting to me was how she defines success.

Because people were already telling her to go farther. Ottawa, Kingston, bigger markets, more reach. But she didn't want it. I think looking back on everything you've built, what has this journey taught you about starting before you're ready?

Just do it. And again, trust God. If you are into the faith, leave it at him and he will guide you where you need to go. Um, that might not always be your vision, you know.

Being a nurse was my vision. I thought that I was going to continue being a nurse and do all that, and this would just be on the side, but God had other plans. Um, so I just let Jesus take the wheel. And uh yeah, this is where we've drove to.

Um, I'm very grateful, and all I can continue doing is just putting it in his hands. Um, just continue doing what I can. And again, just being there for my community so they can be there for me. I spend most of my professional life in a world where growth is almost automatically treated as the goal.

So I found that answer fascinating. Kirsten wasn't building small because she couldn't imagine something bigger. She had decided that serving people around her was the bigger thing. And because she had spent her previous career caring for people in their homes as a nurse, even that didn't feel like a career change as much as it first appeared.

The business was another expression of something she'd already been doing all along. Care. That word kept turning up even when nobody was using it. And then I met Jess.

Jess Passanetti opened Found and Forage in Kempfill because she saw something that wasn't there. She wanted people to have access to locally, ethically, and sustainably made products, and she wanted makers to have somewhere permanent for their work to be found. But one of the first things Jess said to me had almost nothing to do with retail. She told me she spent much of her life looking for her place.

Can you talk to me a little bit about what the importance is for you in bringing that together? I think I have always searched for my place. And so, and I haven't found it, but in opening this, I have found so many like amazing people, and I feel like I've found my community. And I think that really drove me and pushed, propelled me into this area even more passionately.

And I think, yeah, having this hub has fulfilled a part of my soul. And now I can offer that to other people as well. So if I can do something like that for our community, I think that's amazing. You were really accepted.

This is how actually I found you because you were referred to me on Instagram by a bunch of people were tagged. But when I started following your business, and when you opened doors up, like the community just welcomed you with open arms. They were everyone was so happy you were there. You were so loved, and it's obvious you love back equally.

And I'm really curious about I'm like, do you think that the community in Kempville has shaped the business as much as you've been shaping it as well? The number one thing we hear when people walk in the door is Kempville really needed this. And it's it's not people who are connected to each other, they just come in and they say that. So there was a massive community acceptance and referral.

And oh, I told my friend about this business. This is so amazing. I love this so much. This is my favorite place to go.

Like the community uh response has been absolutely amazing. Yeah, it's been very enjoyable. I remember sitting with that afterwards because I think we use the word community so often that it can become almost meaningless. We tend to use it to describe geography and we certainly use it online.

We use it in marketing, we use it for groups of people who have one thing in common. But community isn't really a place. It's a feeling. It's walking into a coffee shop and someone already knows what you're gonna order.

It's waving to someone across the street, it's going into a store for five minutes and staying for twenty because someone started talking to you. The building doesn't create any of that. People create the conditions for it. And sometimes, like Jess.

They create the very place they had been looking for themselves. And by this point in the season, I wasn't really thinking about businesses in the same way anymore. And then my conversation with Mayor Karina Smith Gatke widened that lens again. Karina grew up in Lansdowne, left, built a career, came home, built a business, and eventually became mayor.

But the part of her story that mattered most to me in the context of this season happened much earlier. She grew up watching women in her community see things that needed to be done and decided to do them. One of those things was a community center. What is it that really is sparking that so much for you, other than the obvious, but what is it?

Yes. So um I was raised by strong women. And I say women, not just my mother. My mother is very, she taught me how to be independent, pay my own bills, not look to anyone else to drive my life like I was the master of my own destiny.

And if you want to do something, then go and work hard and get it done. Um and my family life growing up on a farm, you do you're a veterinary, you're an accountant, you're a mechanic, you're uh, you know, you're all these things. So uh you sort of figure it out as you go. Um, but when I say that I was raised by strong women, I'm talking about a women uh women who made up the community and were the community champions.

And the one that I referred to earlier, Joanne, um, that was my mom's best friend at one point, and she was very involved politically. So I remember putting up signs and going to campaign things with my uh my mom's friend as well as my parents at an early age. And so we talk, I and I probably didn't even realize it at the time, but there was a lot of talk at the dinner table every night about the world and our community and and everything in between. So when you have the opportunity to listen to this sort of, you know, road discussion or um, you know, why are they putting up a new municipal office building like this is crazy and all that sort of thing, that sort of gets ingrained to you in you.

But there's all these women who saw the need in our community, Joanne being one of them. So before Joanne ever ran for municipal government, and I believe she was the first woman member of our council in the front of Leeds and Lansdowne. But she, there were five of them, and I think out of the five, there was either three or four women that were the champions to build the community center. And by sheer will, they raised the funds.

And it was, I think, Winterio at the time who gave us the rest of the funds, and they built a community center, which then became the municipal office, it became the library, it became everything, it became that community hub. And and if that woman decided she was going to do something, there was nothing stopping her. Um, but there's all these other women who were alongside of her, linking arms, and those were my mom's friends as well. So I look at all those women who did what they needed to do because it was the right thing for the community.

And those are the the examples that I try to live into. I think that's one of the things we forget about community. We inherit so much of it. We inherit the halls and the fairs and the organizations and the traditions.

And because many of them were already here when we arrived, it's easy to forget that at some point they weren't. Somebody noticed something was needed, somebody put their hand up, somebody convinced a few other people to help. And years later, children grow up assuming it's always been there. Karina was one of those children.

She watched those women, and years later, she put her own name forward. And suddenly there was another part of the story I hadn't really considered. It's not enough for someone to just build these things. Eventually, somebody else has to take their turn caring for them.

That became impossible for me to ignore when I sat down with Kenna McCall for the Merrickville Artist Guild. Merrickville has been known as an arts community for as long as I can remember. I grew up around it. My mother collected local art, I collect local art.

The studio tour has existed for decades. I don't think I ever seriously considered the possibility that any of it might not have always been here. And then I started looking at what actually keeps it going. When a community that benefits from the arts but doesn't necessarily meaningfully meaningfully invest in them, what happens to that community, that arts community?

Well, what happens is what is happening and has happened over is they ebb and flow based on the volunteers. So some keen volunteers like myself and the board we have right now, we come along and we say, well, we're going to, you know, establish this, that, and the other, and we have a bit of a vision. And uh then we burn out because we don't have the funding, we don't have volunteers, all those kind of things. So if nobody steps in our shoes, then it will just go on hiatus or pause or even die out.

That conversation bothered me a little bit, but in a good way, because I started thinking about all the things we treat as though they belong to a town. The fall fair, the hockey tournament, the Christmas parade, the community hall, the arts organizations, those little traditions that happen every year and become part of how we recognize home. But a town can't care for any of those things. People do.

There is always somebody filling out the form, organizing the volunteers, unlocking the door, finding the money, making the phone calls, and then wondering if they have enough left in them to do it all again next year. Whether it's participating in an event or whether it's having an exhibition or even just to come and get some information, um, they do benefit from it. So I wanted the next generation to not for it not to be such a struggle and not to be so difficult for them and for the community to benefit.

That was probably the biggest shift for me across this whole season. Because loving a place doesn't preserve it. Loving the idea of small-town life doesn't keep the businesses open or the organizations running or the traditions going. Somebody has to do something.

And then I sat down with somebody I've known since I was three years old. I've known Ron Eagle for almost my entire life. When I was little, he was Ronnie, the young carpenter working on some of the old houses my mom was renovating in Merrickville. And I don't think I'd ever stop to consider how much of his life I've been walking past ever since.

The houses, the roofs, the community center, nearly 40 years as a volunteer firefighter. A business built entirely on word of mouth in a town where everybody knows where you live. Yeah, and I know in that in that one, I was very proud to get the job. And uh I I was given free reign basically to pick out the colors and materials to to go on it, and um, so it turned out quite well.

There's a still a little bit more to do there, but um I gotta get back there and button that up. But no, it uh that was something that I was glad to get because that way I can leave it behind and and make it look historic, you know, or you know, the some of the details. So make it look pretty. Do you think there's a connection between building things that you have and also the way that you've built your life?

Like do you look at because you've built homes and you've and it's all been within the community, but when you look around the village, it's pretty hard not to point somewhere and see Ron Eagle within this village. Oh, yeah. Well, I go by, oh, you did that roof. Yeah, I did that roof.

Yes. You know, um, and how uh the way it works is uh you do everything so it keeps you close to home. You know, I can build a deck or build a house or whatever. And um, so it's nice that as a variety is really nice too.

And like I say, you you try to make something look good and and uh make the village look even prettier. Yeah. But um yeah, the price of gas, it's nice to be able to stay close to home. But it's it's my home, and uh, like I said, I'm spending I'm trying to make more effort into making Merrickville a uh a nicer place.

But the thing Ron still wants to build is what stayed with me. He owns a piece of land behind his house, and he has this vision for a barn where people can gather. People who've lived here forever, people who've just moved here. Everybody with a little name tag, because as Ron pointed out, you might have been waving at your neighbor for three years without actually knowing their name.

It's such a wonderfully Ron solution to community building. And when I asked him about leaving something behind, he wasn't particularly grand about it. He's a carpenter. That's how he describes himself.

What do you hope is still here because you were here? No, I like I said earlier, I just I figure if I can leave Merrickville a better spot uh than when I was here, that that's even better. So I that's what I hoped for is leave something that people can still enjoy down the road. What do you hope that people will remember about you?

Well, you I guess in in the long run, uh good carpenter. I think Ron helped me understand the difference between living somewhere and belonging to it. Belonging isn't only about how deep your roots go or how many years you've been there. At some point, belonging becomes reciprocal.

This place has given something to me, so what am I going to give back to it? And then, for the final conversation of the season, I drove to Athens. I went to Athens because Samantha, Joanne Sitsman's granddaughter, told me I needed to meet her grandmother. Joanne owns a village store, a little grocery store in the middle of a village, of fewer than a thousand people.

And I'll admit when I first walked in, nostalgia got me right in the feels. My grandparents owned a general store, and although it was gone before I was ever born, I spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about it. So when I walked into Joanne's store, with the old floors and the deli counter and that set of bells on the door, I thought maybe that's why it felt so familiar. But nostalgia wasn't really the story.

Joanne told me that when she was a child, the stores in Athens were always personal. People knew your name, you could have a conversation. It wasn't simply a transaction. And then she built exactly that kind of place herself.

What I've learned about the folks in Athens is that they care about each other. And you know, sometimes the interaction is 30 seconds. But everybody's got a story. So you'll often see someone, and then later on you'll say, Oh, I heard, you know, they've been going through a hard time, or you know, somebody down the street has, you know, lost a lost a loved one and they're on their own, and you know, you kind of don't see them for a while and what's going on, and then someone will be like everyone knows, everyone I don't want to say watches, maybe observes, and everyone cares.

So you could say, oh, that's like like living in a fish bowl or or they're gossiping, but it's not, it's genuine concern. People want to know, you know, how's it going? And uh, I hear that regularly. How's business?

Is business okay? Um, yeah, people people care and tea and people take pride in their community. And I and I have a confession to make. On Monday, I was to open the store at 7 a.

m., but somehow in my mind, I was on the eight o'clock shift. And about 25 after 7, I get a call from my sister who also works at the store, and she says, Um, you don't want to hear this, but there's no one at the store and it's not open. And I said, Oh.

I said, Well, I could be there in 10 minutes because I'm ready to go. I'm just, you know, killing time, really. So I get there and and I open up, and and right away, Caroline from next door, she said, we were worried. She needed, she just needed to borrow some coffee filters for for her.

And I said, I said, I thought I was on at eight, but apparently, no, it's me. I'm I'm I'm late. So anyway. I love that story because nobody was angry that the grocery store wasn't open.

They were worried about Joanne. And I think by then I finally understood what I had been circling around all season. We talk about supporting local business as though the relationship moves in one direction. The community supports the business.

We shop there, we spend our money there, we keep the doors open. But Joanne doesn't see it that way at all. She shops at the other businesses in Athens because she wants their doors to stay open too. She buys gas there, she banks there, she knows that if the community wants those things to remain part of the community, people have to use them.

And then she said the thing that for me brought this entire season together. You know, people understand that yeah, we need a certain level of business to stay in business, and they're they're willing to pay the you know, the few cents extra. Some things are actually cheaper sometimes. We're we're very happy of that.

Somebody'll come in and say, gee, you know, it was more over it was more expensive at Walmart. And then I think to myself, okay, so we've got our pricing wrong. I better go check. Yeah, are we okay?

Um, but yeah, um, people do understand that if you don't use it, you lose it. So, you know, I buy all my gas in the village and I have an account over at the bank. And um yeah, you know, we I I shop at my store all the time. Although I did say to somebody one day, I said, even I can't afford to shop here for that.

I go to I go to go to I go to Costco for that. But but generally speaking, you know, people um appreciate the fact that they've got the LCBO and they've got the bank and they've got you know two, they've got a garage now, um, and and the gas station. So these things don't stay if people don't support them. And you you look around, I I lived in we shopped in Mallorytown because we lived out that way, and we always shopped at the grocery store in Mallorytown.

But in the time that we were there, the gas station closed and the bank closed. And um, you know, you miss them when they were gone. Um so I'm thinking, and people are watching, you know, Delta lost the bank, and I believe Elgin lost their bank. So Westport, I believe, lost their bank as well.

I think so, you know, how long we can hang on, um, you know, because that will change the fabric of the community as well, if if those those key those key elements are missing. It's it's the sum of the whole that makes the village work, not not the individual players in the in the in the field. I think that's it. I started this season wanting to understand the business behind Main Street, and I still do.

I think these businesses matter enormously. But I don't think they're separate from the places around them anymore. I I don't even know if there's a clear line between the two. A coffee shop can make sure someone isn't alone on Christmas morning, a farm stand can become another way of caring for your neighbors.

A store can give forty makers somewhere to belong. A group of women can decide their community needs a building and raise the money to build one. An arts organization can spend years quietly making sure another generation inherits something worth keeping. A carpenter can spend 40 years answering fire calls and fixing roofs and still be thinking about the place he wants to build so neighbors who don't know each other's names can finally meet.

And a grocery store owner can forget to open one morning and discover that half the village isn't wondering where they're gonna get their milk, they're wondering whether she's okay. Maybe that's what I've learned. Small towns don't simply happen. We inherit parts of them, certainly.

We inherit old buildings and stories and traditions and businesses that existed before us. But every generation makes choices about what happens to those things next. We decide where we spend our money, we decide whether we volunteer, we decide whether we introduce ourselves to new neighbors or wave from the car. We decide whether we put our name forward, whether we take over when someone else is tired, whether we build the thing that's missing, and whether the places and people around us are worth caring for.

And enough of those little decisions made by enough people over enough time become a community. Joanne said people like to feel known. I think she's right about that too. Because maybe underneath all the businesses and buildings and traditions I've spent this season talking about, that's what we're really trying to hold on to.

The feeling that somebody knows we're here and that we know they're here too. And maybe that's also why these places ask something of us in return. They ask us to notice, to participate, to support the businesses we hope will still be here ten years from now, to put our hand up when something needs doing, to take our turn when someone else has been carrying something for long enough. And sometimes just to learn the name of the person we've been waving to every morning for the last three years.

Because small towns don't stay small towns simply because we love them. They stay that way because people continue to take care of the things that make them what they are. I think that's the thing I didn't fully understand when I sat down to record the very first episode of this show. I thought I was gonna go looking for people behind Main Street, but somewhere along the way I realized I was really looking at all the ways people make a place feel like home and all the little things they do to keep it feeling that way for the people who come next.

And after ten conversations, I think Joanne may have said it best it's the sum of the whole that makes the village work. None of us is the whole thing, but all of us get to decide what part we're going to play in it. Anyway, just something to noodle on until the next time we talk. I'll see you soon in season two.

Thanks for listening to Small Town Stories. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, make sure you're following the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't done so yet, I'd be really grateful if you left a rating and review. It really helps more people discover the show.

You can follow along on Instagram at the Small Town Stories Podcast and visit us online at the Small Town Stories Podcast.com. All right, I'll see you next Thursday for another conversation about the business behind Main Street.