My attention was recently attracted to a citizen of our town seated n an arm chair in the shade of a pecan tree on the courthouse green. He wasn’t sitting on one of the benches provided for casual loungers; he had obtained a more comfortable chair from one of the courthouse officials.
Day after day, for several days, I noticed this citizen occupying a chair on the courthouse green, moving his chair from time to time to get out of the sun.
My curiosity aroused, I paused one day and interviewed the citizen. “You seem to be taking a vacation!” I said.
“Ye, I am taking my vacation,” he said. “I have worked hard all year and the hot weather was about to get me. I usually knock off about this time of the year and go to Nags Head for a week, but I stopped out here the other day and sat down in the shade, and I find it actually more comfortable here in the day tie than it is on the seashore.
“It’s just as pleasant here as it is at the seashore and I can get the same rest here I would get if I went a thousand miles away from home.
“I am not only getting the rest I need and feeling comfortable, but sitting out here on the courthouse green and seeing everybody in town coming and going, I’m getting better acquainted with the town. Many people stop and talk and I find myself getting acquainted with folks who have lived here all the time but who were always strangers to me because I was always busy when I was home and never had much time to meet and talk to folks. I am putting a week out here and I believe it’s going to be the most pleasant and profitable vacation week I ever had.”
That citizen gave me something to think about. He is just a plain citizen who wears plain clothes and goes collarless in his shirt sleeves, but he is a philosopher. Wouldn’t all of us be better citizens, better neighbors and have a better acquaintance with our home town and its folks if we too would take a week’s vacation in the old home town once a year and put in the time watching the daily grind from an easy chair and swapping friendly talk with all who came by? I think so. And I agree with the citizen who found quiet and shade and cooling breezes on the courthouse green; the old home town on the hottest day in the year, after all, as comfortable as most of the highly advertised resort places. I am sure the thermometer on Main Street will not go higher than the thermometer in any town in the mountains or the thermometer on any seaside pavilion anywhere along the South Atlantic seaboard.
From the editorial page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, Aug. 13, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn83025812/1926-08-13/ed-1/seq-4/
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