October 6, 2022
It would be nice to live in a small town, Kathy commented when we drove through Elgin, Ontario, on the way home from the cottage. Yes, I thought, there is an aura of quiet peace and stillness in the air, one could live a pleasant life here. You do not find ostentatious houses resembling Italian castles on postage-sized lots, as you see in Ottawa. In contrast, you see simple, functional houses here of modest sizes where one can bring up a family without being afraid of huge heating bills. And, yes, we have met many people with no pretensions and who had done work for us without feeling they overcharged. Would it be a way of life for us to live here?
We came from our cottage, which is a boat ride, and then an 8-kilometer car ride from Elgin. According to Wikipedia, Elgin has a population of 300 people but grows by thousands more during the summer, who come from Ontario and the US. Elgin is a crossroads of two major streets and a few spurs. But the town has a grocery store, two churches, a bank, a pharmacy, a library, and an appliance store. It has a regional high school and a public school as well.
The town has everything for basic needs, except a gas station; there was one, but not anymore. The owner may have retired or sold out. But the gas station was a place where you could return beer bottles. The same situation happened to a place for refilling propane tanks. Now I have to drive a few miles to the next little town. And Abe, who ran Emmons Lumber, retired as well.
Abe came out to our cottage to give us an estimate for our windows that needed a replacement a few decades ago. In a leisurely conversation with us, he said with a smile on his face, his lumber business thrives on the summer cottagers. While his boys were measuring up the windows, Abe settled down with us and discussed life in Elgin. Our encounter was nothing like contractors we dealt with in Ottawa where a young man, while giving us an estimate of window replacements in our house, sat by his computer and generated the estimate in ten minutes, and then left.
When I needed someone to expand our decking, I called on Chuck (not his real name). Chuck came to see us and, like Abe, had a detailed conversation on what we wanted to do. We staked out the deck and then did a quick calculation of materials and labor and that was the estimate. We never signed a contract. And the job turned out very well.
Country folk have a practical turn of mind and get things done. I like that. And there were many other situations where we found problems solved with no fuss. For example, when our son visited us and ran out of diapers for his baby on a Sunday, the pharmacy was closed. A phone call to the marina where we dock our boat resulted in having the pharmacist open up the store so we could buy diapers; what a demonstration of goodwill!
People know each other in a small town. More than that, they know each other’s families going back generations. This closeness often leads to relationships in the community as we found out that the family running the marina has a family member married to the owner of the grocery store and another family member works at the appliance store.
My thoughts returned to living in a small town driving through the industrial east end of Ottawa with heavy traffic. It is much more peaceful in a small town than in a thriving city. But, and there are always buts, you do not find in a small town a choice of restaurants, community centers with programs such as bridge, and a multiplicity of events from classical music to rock concerts. Most importantly, could an outsider fit into a tightly-knit community where most people know each other? Would they accept newcomers?
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