Reflections on the promise of small-town America, at 250

The Modern Heretic

I remember the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. I was ten, in fourth grade, and American pride was everywhere that year - sincere, unselfconscious, stitched into the curriculum just like math or spelling. I was raised on the promise of this country: the granddaughter of proud immigrants, second-generation proof of a story built on the hard work, blood, sweat, and tears of ancestors who were industrious and, crucially, lucky. Fifty years later, I had all but lost hold of that dream.

Then I went for a morning walk in small-town Maine.

The Walk

I was visiting a dear friend, and I set out alone, the way I have often throughout my life, wandering, exploring, no destination, just a road and the particular grey light of a humid Maine morning threatening rain. The first thing I passed was an old barn, its wood gone the color of strong tea, a red tin roof catching what little sun there was. A flag hung from a line strung between two posts, next to a row of small red, white and blue paper pennants, the whole scene so unstudied it could have been a diorama of *American Barn, Late Summer* except it was just someone’s actual life, their actual flag.

Further on, a grey colonial with dark shutters, tucked behind pines and wrapped in traditional Fourth of July bunting that had clearly been hung with some care: a small ceremony of belonging performed for no audience but the road and the neighbors. And then, a few yards past a stone wall soft with hostas and black-eyed Susans, a sign staked into someone’s lawn: “Hate will not make us great.” Planted like a bulb, the way you plant something because you expect it to still be there next spring.

Further still, at the edge of the road, a weathered wooden sign for a lobster farm -hand-lettered, a little crooked, advertising rope crafts alongside the day’s catch. Beneath it, someone had hung two things made of braided rope: a small sunburst, and a rainbow-colored heart, swaying slightly in the wet air. It was just there, the way pride flags and lobster signs and church suppers are just there in these towns, unbothered by whoever happens to walk past.

What I Carried With Me

I have spent most of my adult life in cities, where irony is the native language and sincerity has to apologize for itself before it’s allowed to speak. So it startled me, walking that road, to feel something like hope again - not the hope of the ten-year-old in 1976, who believed the whole thing without qualification, but something more scarred and more chosen. A hope that has done its homework. I know too much now not to hold this complicated truth in me: I am the daughter of immigrants who understand, in their bodies, what this country asks of and promises to the people it lets in. I am a witness to my government’s hand - and its allies’ - in wars and violence and displacements that never make it onto a Bicentennial poster. And I am the partner of a Black American man who would not have taken this same walk with the same ease I did. He would have done the math before his feet hit the pavement - which road, what time, whose porch light. I got to be a stranger in a strange town and feel only curiosity.

That asymmetry doesn’t cancel the beauty of the barn or the sincerity of the sign in the flowerbed. It just means I can’t look at either one without seeing all of it at once.

The Morning After

The morning after that walk, my small-town Maine host’s Instagram story found me as I had coffee: a screenshot of a New York Times headline over a photo of FBI evidence technicians in blue gloves, working a police line strung across an intersection. “This happened in Biddeford,” she’d written, “twenty minutes from my house.” Twenty minutes from the barn with the red roof. Twenty minutes from the rope heart hanging in the rain. An ICE officer had shot and killed a man in his car that Monday morning, during what the agency described as a vehicle stop connected to a surveillance operation targeting someone else’s address. Local advocacy groups identified him as a twenty-six-year-old Colombian man they said was authorized to work in this country. Neighbors said they heard the shots - six of them. Someone said they saw his wife and his daughter crying in the street. Maine’s attorney general opened an investigation before the day was out.

I don’t know if I walked anywhere near his neighborhood. I don’t know if his house had a flag on it too, or bunting, or a sign about hate in the flowerbed. I know that the same morning air I found so gentle was, for someone else’s family a few towns over, the air their life ended in. That is the whole complicated inheritance in one sentence: the barn and the ski mask, the rope heart and the six shots, the same 15 miles of Maine coastline holding both. I don’t think the sincerity of the flag bunting cancels this out, and I don’t think this cancels out the sincerity of the flag bunting. I think they are, unbearably, the same country, the same week, the same morning.

Still Growing Through the Cracks

Maybe that’s the actual inheritance of turning two hundred and fifty as a country, and turning sixty as a person who’s watched a fair share of that history: you don’t get to keep the fantasy uncomplicated, but you don’t have to surrender it either. A seed doesn’t ask permission before it finds the crack in worn-out pavement. It just grows there, unreasonably, because the sun still shows up and so does the rain. Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy” playing in my earbuds as I walk by a barn, a flag, a homemade sign, a rope heart in rainbow colors. The seed pushes through that inhospitable ground not because the dream is intact, but because it’s still stubbornly, foolishly, necessarily growing through the cracks. I can grieve the young man murdered in the street and the girl who believed the dream without qualification in 1976 and still recognize her, faintly, in the woman who noticed all of this on a Tuesday morning walk and had to stop and take a picture.

There is no version of this that is simple. We just get to keep walking.

Dr. Suzanne Gilberg is a board-certified OB/GYN, integrative medicine physician, Chief Clinical Officer at Monarch MD, and founder of the Menopause Boot Camp. She is the author of Menopause Bootcamp and the forthcoming Plant Medicine. Find her at @askdrsuzanne and @themenopausebootcamp.