I’m a New Yorker – I feel like I’ve said that more in this last week
than in any of my previous stints out of town. Even those that lasted
a few years. But in trying to understand Ashland, I keep coming up
against how different it is from what I’ve become accustomed to in
that East Coast metropolis.

Sitting in a clearly popular coffee shop (it can be hard to get a
seat), it has the same sepia glow of an Instagram photo that I’ve
become accustomed to in Brooklyn. But there’s a difference. Looking
around, I see the requisite hipster Macs, iPhones and beards. What’s
missing is the sense of an audience. There’s an unselfconscious air
about cool in Ashland. In New York, it’s studied, calculated,
documented with the target audience always in mind.

New York often gets a bad rep for being mean. It’s not really – most
New Yorkers are simply in a hurry. Everyone is vaguely impatient or
annoyed at any given point of day or night. Someone is always in the
way, walking too slow, or taking up needed space. New Yorkers can be
nice and are often considerate, but it’s always an interruption of the
daily rush.

In Ashland, not so much. Here, I have been on the sidewalk, waiting
for a break in traffic to cross and suddenly I find the traffic has
stopped to wait for me. Or I’m at the register at my local coffee
spot, the barista answers my questions with absolutely no sense of
trying to hurry me up, despite the long line behind me. Or the small
conversations I’ve had with the cashiers each time I’ve been to the
grocery store. Conversations about nothing, really, but the simple
act of talking to people that I may never see again as if they are my
neighbors is extraordinary to me.

It’s all done here with a sense that this is normal, a daily practice.
I’m not taking up someone’s time with a question, they patiently wait
but there’s no exertion of patience, it’s effortless. Friendliness and
patience seem effortless and genuine in Ashland.

I’m from a small town, and growing up I was used to running into
friends from church or school at the mall. Friends’ parents worked at
the bank and the grocery store – so even when I go back to visit, I
may run into them and have a brief chat. But with that – I do know
them, or my mother does, or we know people in common, so there’s a
reason to reach across that divide. But here…people reach out a
welcoming hand as a matter of course. A gap that in New York can seem
as deep as the Mariana Trench is bridged as if were a puddle. Ashland
is bringing a whole new meaning to “Mind the Gap.”