About this blog

I like local—local culture, with neighbors and friends and civic organizations, and a lively local economy with interdependent, locally-owned businesses that promote shared purpose. I like locally-grown food, the local library, the local theatre group, and local charity. I like, basically, the relationships that “local” cultivates—relationships that used to define community.

Genuine community grows from two parallel ingredients: 1. People who know each other, care about each other, and to a degree share responsibility for each other’s successes and failures, and 2. Business infrastructure that allows for some degree of community self-sufficiency. Number one is inherent in human nature (at least according to the glass-is-half-full crowd). Number two, however, is a tall order by anyone’s standard, especially in today’s America, defined as it is by easy travel, mass communication, and centralized business and government. Our most common partners today are the third-party, the distant bureaucrat, the global business—none of which can support even a speck of relationship.

My family is blessed with real community, out here in this rural, generally poor Pennsylvania mountain region. Our community is the skeleton upon which I hang this writing. Visit often, to see what makes life full and fine and affable.