In praise of the tiny

I've always loved the tiny. Small is good. I live in a 350 sf apartment. I like macro photography, both viewing it and creating it. I prefer teaspoons to tablespoons. I like small journals. I've even made small journals:

The little journals are my creations. The smallest one is called a jelly bean book. The framed watercolor is done by artist Cathy Nash. Her watercolors are very small, and usually depict rural scenes. Here is another view of her work-

To that end, here is Rachel Beltz with her very tiny watercolors. In praise of the small! Definitely click on the link to see the rest of these tiny masterpieces of detail and charm.

See even more of Rachel's work at her Instagram page.

Big or small, "Art is literacy of the heart" ~Elliot Eisner

My town is so small...

How small is it?

Small town life in rural Georgia is all it’s cracked up to be. My former town was Gray, Maine which at pop, 7,500, locals there dubbed a small town. That town is quite different from my small town here, which has a population of 400. Even in the unincorporated section of town the population still barely reaches 1,000. Cumberland County Maine has a quarter of a million people. Our entire county of five towns and miles of land is only 25,000. It's small.

It’s so small that: the parking spaces in front of the Post office on the main drag are vertical, not parallel. When you leave, you have to back out into the main street. It’s not a problem.

It’s so small that: On the Post Office’s Christmas busiest mailing day of the year, there was no line at the counter.

It is so small that: when you pass a vehicle on a rural road, the other driver waves.

It’s so small that the hardware store guy stands outside to chat with a buddy while you shop, and just holler when you’re ready to pay.

It’s small and it’s great. Now, usually when people move in from the ‘city’ to a small town they want the rural aspects but they also bring big-city wants with them, like sewer service, trash service, foreign films, delis, cappuccino. Then they complain when the taxes go up. Or when a charming someplace or there gets paved over. I don’t want any of that and I don’t miss it.

I was driving to an adjacent county I hadn’t visited before and in that county is a small city. Its main drag had the usual array of stores and restaurants. And there, forgotten by me for many months, was a McDonald’s! I thought back, where is the closest McD’s to where I live? This one, 30 miles away, and on the other side of the county 30 miles in the other direction. That’s it! It’s nice to move to a place where you can forget about fast food. Fast food means fast living and I guess I moved to the right place to slow down.