JINGLE MINGLE AND THE ISLAND STUDIOS
JINGLE Mingle is a day when the stores of Marshall are all open for Christmas shopping with more small booths set up in the Marshall Book Exchange space where Jamie’s used book store was flooded out. The restoration of the large room is almost complete.
Across the river the Marshall High School Studios on Blannahassett Island were also open with the artists there to show their studios.
Both of these events add to the feeling of having moved into a community of people who are not connected by work or institutions but by friendship and enjoy living side by side and celebrating together. Marshall, with its mix of traditional Appalachian people, and urban newcomers from afar looking for simpler mountain living, may not be a typical American small town. But I think it is one form of small American town with folksy small town values which many AMericans feel is a threatened way of life, a way of life in this rapidly changing world that they want to hang on to and probably one of the reasons America is so polarized these days.
JINGLE MINGLE
MARSHALL HIGH SCHOOL STUDIOS
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 