Our town might not interest your rebellious side, might not offer a tour de force of frescoes or tramcars whipping past to give that feeling of being somewhere happening, but ours is a place where lesser thrills seem elevated and few need further convincing of what they’ve always known: essentially the self is satisfied, will sit out back receptively with nothing more than birds, trees, wind. In another age, this kind of life might have been described as leisurely, attentive, not dull or backward as some are now suggesting. While tweets and status updates seem the rage, the truer update, you’ll agree, is when you find yourself observing what occurs just feet away in any direction, time’s slow revealing of itself, still somehow unaccounted for. How you came to be here, though, is just as much a mystery as why you might have settled somewhere else but didn’t; and had you, I doubt the explanation why could be as clearly drawn out as the shadow of a barn that stretches all it knows across a field. No one’s saying this is Eden; no one’s claiming we’re the Shangri la of how it ought to be; but since you’re here, you might as well decide to settle in and sample what our lack of bistro chairs and trinket shops has added to the wealth of our economy. The question of what you were born for, though not easily answered, is welcome here; to varying degrees you’ll be among a sympathetic crowd believing bouts of solitude are healthy and not a sign of anti-social tendencies or ill toward others. We’re fine with letting progress move along toward somewhere else as long as after supper we’re allowed to wander out and gather in the silence of the stars. Not exactly what the crowds compete to see, we understand, but no one here’s apologizing or asking for a camera crew to document the quiet we’ve grown fond of keeping to ourselves. In fact, the fewer who find us the better. But you’re welcome to stay. We hope you will. Our town could use another kindred soul, stopped in from the cold, someone awake to what it’s all about, the less that makes much of the little we are.