by Rosellen Brown

About the author: Rosellen Brown is the author of the novel Before and After.

For many years, from the beginning of the 1970’s, my family and I lived in Peterborough, a town of about 5,000 in southern New Hampshire. Thornton Wilder was in residence there when he wrote Our Town, which used, unchanged, the names of the nearest mountain and river and exemplified the community’s peace, modesty and common sense.

A Crime-Free Small Town

Though we moved to Houston 13 years ago, we return to our old neighbors every summer, to the secure, nurturing society in which our children grew up. This is a town where shopkeepers still walk fearlessly down Main Street carrying their bags of cash- register money to the bank. Where a newspaper headline that read “Crack Found in High School...