“Just show up,” we say. “Get involved.”

It all sounds so simple. Move into town, pick a community organization, and walk in the door. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy, right?

It is easy to walk in that door when you grew up in a small town, when a toddler-sized you paddled around the community pool, when your grandfather was once the town supervisor. 

It’s easy too to take for granted just how easy it all is. 

I should know. I paddled in that pool. My grandfather was that politician. When I walk into a room in Callicoon, chances are pretty good that at least a few people in it will know who I am. 

When you’ve grown up in a small town, all it takes to “show up” is walking into a familiar space filled with familiar faces. 

There’s no driving into an unfamiliar parking lot and making sense of the haphazard assembly of cars on a spit of cement with no lines. There’s no sitting in the car studying the various entrances and wondering “which one do I enter?” There’s no walking into a room buzzing with activity only to hear the voices fall silent as the entire crowd turns to examine the newcomer who’s just come through the door. There’s no wondering who does what and whether you’ll step on someone’s toes. 

A few weeks ago, I walked into one of those familiar rooms. There were eight women there, along with appetizers, crayons and a table covered in coloring pages. 

We’d come together to add color to the pages of a special project, the Callicoon Tractor Parade coloring book. Our goal was to create some buzz for the coloring book created by my friend Tera and me, the book that will be on sale at this weekend’s parade to raise money for the Delaware Youth Center.

It didn't take long to clock that most of us at that table belonged here the easy way. My best friend's family has been here so long that her last name does her introducing. Another woman's relatives were fixtures at our school. There were names that go back and faces the whole town could place.

There were also the women who grew up in another state, even another country.

They didn't have one of those names, one of those relatives at the school, one of those hazy childhood memories of dipping their toes in that pool. They were the ones who drove into the unfamiliar parking lot. They were the ones who studied the doors and wondered which one. They walked into the buzzing room not knowing whether the voices would go quiet. 

They did all the things I have never once had to do, and they did them anyway.

If you’d walked into that room of women noshing on cheese, carefully coloring in tractors and swapping stories, you’d never know which one was which.