I started thinking about this when I found out that our local hardware store was closing in Roanoke, Va.
I have been wondering about what makes a neighborhood. Is it a grocery store, a swimming pool, or just the people.
We have lived on a farm, in a city, Halifax, NS, in Columbia, MD, and in small towns.
My time in Reston suggests that neighborhoods are harder to engineer than developers might think especially when you control development very tightly.
While it was easy to figure out the neighborhood grocery store for the area in Reston where I had a spot to live. It turned out the neighborhood hardware store was the Home Depot over on Reston Parkway. At least I think it was a Home Depot, they all seem the same after a while.
The big box home improvement store is a poor substitute for a neighborhood hardware store.
There was really no place in Reston to go have breakfast and have a good chance to see the neighbors unless you count the drive thru line at the MacDonald's on Wiehle.
If my memory serves me correctly there are no produce stands in Reston, though I know my daughter has discovered the local farmers market.
Drug stores everywhere lost their personalities years ago, and the ones in Reston are no exception. The hometown bank is more likely an ATM machine or your online banking portal.
There are certainly no funky old appliance stores in Reston.
That pretty well leaves churches, town square, Barnes and Noble, and Starbucks to define the Reston neighborhood.
Maybe we have moved beyond the hardware store and the main streets of places like Mount Airy, NC which in essence have become museums of the way we used to live.
Then again maybe some of us have to live in those museums which are also called small towns. We have to keep them going, so they are there when people need to remember what it was like before the Restons of the world became home.
In our small towns we still have the local hardware, the restaurant where the waitresses know what you want before you order it, and the churches which are intertwined with the whole life of the community. Community events are still are regular part of life that no one wants to miss.
As a relic of the past and someone who has seen the future, I am happy to live in one of those museums on the Carolina coast where you can close a main street for a 50th birthday party without the world coming to an end.
If you want to see life on the coast as it used to be, come visit. We will probably remember you if you show up again next year.
