State of Mind

STATE OF MIND

Home
Tag Archives: State of Mind

The High Ground

Finding ways to thrive

By Tommy Tomlinson

Recently we spent a fine Saturday afternoon in Mount Pleasant. I should specify that it was the Mount Pleasant in North Carolina. It turns out there are dozens of Mount Pleasants all over the country, sometimes more than one in the same state. You can see the appeal. Names can be destiny. Name yourself Mount Pleasant and you’re halfway to pleasantness itself.

The “Mount” part is trickier. I grew up near a Mount Pleasant in south Georgia that was as flat as a shuffleboard table. The North Carolina version doesn’t exactly require hiking poles either. Then again, the Piedmont is known for puffing itself up when it comes to height. One of the reasons Charlotte calls its downtown “uptown” is that there’s a slight rise from the edge of the center city to the main intersection of Trade and Tryon streets. You might not even notice if you’re driving. But it is, technically, “up,” so “uptown” it is. And if Mount Pleasant, out on the eastern edge of Cabarrus County, sits on a patch of relative high ground . . . well, a mountain can be a state of mind.

It’s not far from where we live — less than an hour’s drive — but neither my wife, Alix, nor I had spent time there. Our loss. This time we made it there for a literary festival at the Mount Pleasant library, which is bright and clean and beautiful. It doubles as a rec center. Kids were out on the fields playing baseball, and there was a line at a food truck. It was a busy spot in a busy town.

Not all small towns are like that. You’ve probably taken the back roads through some towns where you wonder if you wandered into the zombie apocalypse. Small towns have been hit hard over the last 50 or 60 years by everything from interstate highways to chain stores to the slow death of local manufacturing. Sometimes all you see is a bunch of boarded-up buildings and a Dollar General. It can make more sense to move, either into the city or out to the country. Sometimes the worst place to be is in between.

But other small towns figure out ways to thrive. Mount Pleasant has a crisp little downtown, old houses in good shape, a distillery housed in an old prison. (They make a bourbon called Conviction.) We met a guy who researches town history, a woman who worked in PR all over the country, and a flock of librarians I would follow into the deep stacks anywhere. Every time we drive through a small town, my wife glances around at the houses and I can see her daydreaming. If Alix likes what she sees, sometimes she’ll say, “What would you think about buying a house and moving somewhere like here?”

She said that about Mount Pleasant.

I grew up in a midsized town — about 30,000 people — and got most of my perspective on small towns from watching TV. For the longest time I thought of small towns as being on either end of a wide range. One end was Mayberry, where almost nothing bad ever happened, except when Aunt Bee made pickles. The other end was Cabot Cove, Maine, where somebody got poisoned, stabbed or shot to death every damn week on Murder, She Wrote. (I still can’t believe nobody figured out that Jessica Fletcher was the most prolific serial killer in human history. None of that happened before she got to town!)

Modern life has flattened a lot of the differences between small towns and everywhere else. Streaming services bring the most obscure movies and shows to anyone with Wi-Fi. Worldwide delivery can put pretty much anything you want on your doorstep by tomorrow morning. A small town might not have a fancy ramen place, but Amazon can send you the ingredients and YouTube can show you the instructions.

The truth, though, is that small towns have never been that different than everywhere else. The settings might be different, but our hearts are the same: We all need to love and be loved, to find pursuits that fulfill us, to grieve when life hands us losses, to reach for something bigger than ourselves.

Those things are true no matter whether you live in a hamlet of 200 or a city of 2 million.

Every person is complicated and so every collection of people is more complicated still. It’s easy to write off a place for thinking or acting a certain way, but remember, that might be a majority, but it’s not a monolith. I’m not sure I could get a two-thirds vote in my own family on any subject except banana pudding. Our love for one another brings us together, but our differences are what makes life interesting.

It took me a long time to learn that you can make your own Mount Pleasant, wherever you are. You can just decide to live on higher ground. You can just decide to be decent to others. You can just decide to make a small town out of your friends and loved ones, even if you live in the middle of the city.

We are not likely to move to the actual Mount Pleasant, even though we enjoyed it. What we hope to do, though, is keep the little bits of it that we brought home with us — the warm feelings, the new friendships, the sense of discovery. I’m sitting here looking at a North Carolina map right now. I’ve been all over this state but there are so many places I still haven’t been. Time to gas up the car. 

State of Mind

STATE OF MIND

Home
Tag Archives: State of Mind

Sweet Spot

A place to watch the world

By Tommy Tomlinson

Every year I mark it on the calendar when it arrives: porch season.

This year we got a dose in the middle of February. We always get a brief false spring right around then. You know winter is coming back for another round so you get outside while you can.

It was 74 degrees one day, 83 the next, and my wife and I took to the porch in the afternoons. The porch was one of the main reasons we bought this old house. It was built in 1929, ancient in a modern city of teardowns. When we got the place the porch was half caved in — it had a big crack in the concrete, running down the middle. We got it resurfaced, and over the last 22 years, and two sets of porch furniture, we’ve spent untold thousands of hours out here.

There are some neighbors we see only when we’re on the porch. They stop by and chat on their way to get a beer down the street, or just on their evening walk. Sometimes they come to browse the books in our Little Free Library. Not long after we put the library in, a young couple with a little girl would stop by a few times a week. An older neighbor noticed, found out the girl’s name, and started leaving books in there with notes for her. Then the couple discovered that the older woman had a dog and started leaving treats for the dog. I’m not sure that couple and that woman ever met. But those little gifts meant the world to them. And to us.

A year or two ago, a waterlogged branch fell off our oak tree in a storm and knocked out the library. We had it rebuilt. You can’t let go of a thing that gives you a story like that.

The porch is our party line, our message board, the place we catch up on news and gossip. It’s where we learn who moved out and who moved in, who got sick and who’s doing better. We have watched children grow from here, and watched other neighbors age.

This winter was a hard one. We had an ice storm one weekend and 11 inches of snow the next. Other parts of the state got it even worse. We got lucky at our house — the power never went out and the pipes didn’t freeze. But man, a winter storm in the South can be lonely. We went entire days without seeing another soul. My wife is from Wisconsin and cheerfully tells stories about having to shovel the driveway every hour when they had one of their regular blizzards. Some people down here — mostly transplants — take to the snow like golden retrievers. The rest of us just hunker.

A week or so after the last snow melted, I saw the shoots of one of our daffodils poking through the dirt. And I knew porch weather was coming.

I have spent some time over the years developing a theory about why the South is believed to be, let’s say, more eccentric than other parts of the country. I call it the Crazy Aunt Theory. In colder places, if you have a crazy aunt, you can just stick her in the attic. But our summers are too hot for that. So we put our crazy aunts on the porch where they can talk to God and everybody.

The porch takes us back to those looser, closer times. You don’t have to text anybody from the porch. You don’t need to look up their socials to see what they’ve been doing. They are voice and flesh, standing right in front of you, having real conversations. Sometimes, if somebody has a few minutes, they’ll come up on the porch and actually sit with us. Crazy, right? Spending time together, in person? And we will sit there with glasses of sweet tea, or possibly bourbon, and talk about — well, maybe, nothing. Some days nothing is the best thing to talk about.

And sometimes we are silent because there is so much to see.

There’s a movie from the ’90s called Smoke that features a character named Augie who runs a little tobacco shop in Brooklyn. Every morning at 8, he takes a single photo of the street corner outside. One of the other characters thinks this is the dumbest thing he’s ever heard . . . until he looks through an album of Augie’s photos. Slowly he notices the little differences, the way the light changes, the weather, the people walking through the frame. He is deeply moved.

That’s the way I think about our porch.

In my mind, I can flip through the album and watch the magnolia on the corner bloom and fade. I can see the wrens who show up every year to build a nest under one of the eaves, making a warm space for their babies: first eggs, then hatchlings, then gone. I can see the lizards who slink out from under the house to sun themselves on the warm concrete. I can turn around the camera and see Alix sitting next to me. We who moved here in our 40s and are now in our 60s and hope to still be around in our 80s.

That second warm day in February, two bluebirds floated into the branches of the ornamental cherry tree in our front yard. Our neighborhood is full of cardinals and robins and swallows. Hawks watch over us from the tops of the trees, and owls call to one another at night. But we don’t get many bluebirds. They felt like a promise. The hard winter was coming to an end. Soon it would be porch season for real. We could live out here again — not virtually, not digitally, but through the rich and beautiful panorama of real life.