Small Town, Big Day

Judith Arnold

 

My quaint New England town, more than 380 years old, takes Independence Day seriously. Our colonial militia defeated the British army in the Battle of Concord. My husband’s daily commute takes him through Minuteman National Park, which preserves the route Paul Revere, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott rode to alert the settlers in the farming villages west of Boston that the Redcoats were headed their way. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem commemorating that ride was written in my town at the Wayside Inn, which is still in operation. My town’s zip code is 01776.

 

I treasure the town’s history, but even more, I treasure what it is today. Just a half-hour’s drive from Boston, it contains winding roads, small farms, and dense forest tracts that remain unchanged from the days when the Wampanoag tribe occupied this territory, long before the white settlers arrived.

 

Of course, the town is firmly ensconced in the 21st century. We have WiFi. We have supermarkets. We have traffic jams—oh, man, do we ever have traffic jams! But we’re still a small town, with a small-town Fourth of July parade. It features fire engines clanging up the main road to the town center, sirens blaring. A caravan of antique cars. Floats sponsored by local businesses. Floats sponsored by churches, scout troops and the police department’s D.A.R.E. program, designed to help keep kids from using alcohol and drugs. Children on bicycles adorned with crepe-paper streamers. Politicians carrying banners and shaking hands. The parade usually ends with a wagon drawn by a team of huge, regal Clydesdales.

 

I created a fictionalized version of my town, which I named Rockford for some of my Bell Bridge Books. Jill in Goodbye to All That lives in Rockford and reserves the “Old Rockford Inn” for her daughter’s bat mitzvah reception. My mystery series, which Bell Bridge Books will launch next year, is also set in Rockford, where the heroine—inspired in part by my younger son’s fourth-grade teacher—plays recreational soccer on a team called the Rockettes and occasionally drops by the “Old Rockford Inn” for a drink.

 

My current release, The April Tree, is set in the fictional town of Wheatley, which is also based on my hometown. It’s a place where tragedies can occur, but so can healing.

 

Reading The April Tree, you will recognize Becky, Elyse, Florie and Mark as people who could have grown up in any small town and who suffer a traumatic loss, one that complicates their passage to adulthood and tests their trust in the world around them. I hope you will also think of them as people who spent many a Fourth of July standing along the edge of the town’s main road, cheering at the fire engines, waving at the scouts on the floats and the children on the decorated bicycles, and gasping in awe at the grandeur of the Clydesdales. They’re small-town American kids, struggling to make sense of life, yearning to make peace with the whimsies of fate—and discovering the meaning of independence in all its manifestations.

 

Happy Independence Day!