Small Towns

Avoiding the fate of always seeing but never having

Petersham © by Dave Graham

It’s been a moderately busy day finishing up some videos for internal work projects, having conference calls with my Brazilian research team counterparts at work, and realizing that my writing has fallen behind. There’s also that realization that I’d “run out” of photos to tell stories to and about, so refreshing the pool would be necessary.

There’s an impending storm again this weekend, and the utilities are all on high alert. Getting ahead of what they were projecting seemed apropos, so I hit the road once the major checklist items were completed.

I used to live in the north-central Massachusetts town of Hubbardston. It’s not much to speak of: a Main Street lined with houses, a post office, and a few shops. It’s a town you drive through, not around, and you’ll spend more time getting from the south end to the north end than expected. Small roads branch off from that main artery, bisecting the town, but they lead to other places, journeys, and stories.

One such town in the approximate middle of nowhere is Petersham. I can’t tell you much about it, but I can tell you that for all of its similarities with Hubbardston, it differs in one significant way: it has a town “square.” It may be playing fast and loose with the definition of our quadratic symbol, but for all intents and purposes, it’s…