Small-Town Charm, the Original

I’ve written before how Andrew and I are working to embrace the surprising small-town charm of our non-shopping-plaza-riddled section of Roseville. The small-town charm that does exist, however, is tainted somewhat by the fact that there’s a major highway a block away and Louis Vuitton within a five-minute drive. Over the past two weeks, however, I’ve been lucky enough to be immersed in some genuine small-town experiences.

In Cornish, for example, the nearest grocery store is the Price Chopper in Windsor, Vermont—a store that, we discovered, carries neither fresh parsley nor cauliflower nor penne pasta nor capers. Last night, here in Connellsville, I went with Mom and Dad to our church picnic, where the Italian food offerings have people lining up for NYC-caliber amounts of time. Worth it, though, for the cavatelli and pierogies (a non-Italian interloper left over from the former Polish priest’s tenure). A dish of homemade cavatelli: $3. Two enormous homemade pierogies smothered in onions and butter: $1.50.

And on Wednesday we made a stop at Lynn’s for wing night—probably a shock for my fruit/veggie/yogurt-saturated baby. A dozen wings are less than $5.

It’s also a kind of small-town feeling to go to all these places as a visibly pregnant woman being escorted by her parents (Andrew’s back at work in California). Fortunately, most of the people we run into around here are friends or family members, so the only eyebrows raised are the ones in my imagination.

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