Small Towns (not a John Mellencamp post)

Have you ever noticed that some small towns have as much character as the most notable big cities? Strange how that is.

Eufala, Alabama is a town I love. As you drive down the main street, all these French mansions line the road, on both sides. It is really something to see. The town has lush vegetation, which you don't see everywhere in Alabama.

Wakefield, Quebec is a little artsy town nestled in the Gatineau hills beside the Gatineau river. It is the perfect little artsy town, and most of the arts community from nearby Ottawa, Ontario lives here. There are rumours that famous folk live here, but the locals are discrete and won't tell you who. (Kathleen Edwards! Kathleen Edwards!) Every Saturday night, the whole town congregates in a bar called the Black Sheep Inn. The townsfolk try to keep the local drunks from embarassing themselves, but sometimes fail at this. I frequently expect Hobbits to pop out of a hole while I am there.

I can't tell you how many nameless towns in Tennessee I have been through - nestled in a valley between mountains, as if they were the only towns in the world. And yet in these towns, the normal rhythm of life carries on - there are Arby's and Food Lion stores, and the golden arches.

At the end of the Cabot trail is a small Acadian town whose name I forget. The Acadians are the ancestors of Louisiana's Cajuns, and visiting is like a trip there in some ways, except the scenery looks like Scotland. The locals speak French with an accent very unlike the French spoken here in the Ottawa valley - they talk, well, a little like the "Aieee doo!" guy from the Kia commercials. :-)

Bloomfield, on Quinte's Isle is perhaps the most gentrified small town on the face of the Earth. Every block screams "Toronto", but the adaptive Torontonians try so hard to fit into the small town life, that it is kind of a quaint pastiche all to itself.

Funny how I remember just as much about these little towns as I do Atlanta, Syracuse, or Toronto. I guess it is all about quality, not quantity.