Hancock’s Fiddleheads Café reopened Memorial Day weekend after a winter hiatus, during which time owner Sherry Williams continued her search for a buyer to fulfill her retirement goal, having worked might and main at the business for 18 years.

Ownership events occurring with small, rural businesses in New England towns breed anxious moments for people in those communities. A single café or market (or inn) may be all they have that provides some vibrancy to Main Street or saves time driving elsewhere for shopping and congregating. The businesses may also have historic significance. They may have been at the center of town for a century or more, raising issues of preservation and stewardship.

Will a new owner know these things? Will they embrace them in the face of the usual business challenges around here, including winter?

Fortunately, experts in these regards stepped up to acquire and manage Fiddleheads, beginning with Hancock resident Eleanor Briggs, who purchased the business for the second time to give it a soft landing and leased the name and building to Samantha Rule, who arrived in town after successful stints with two Harrisville treasures -- Harrisville General Store, which she ran for eight years; and Aldworth Manor, where she was chef.

Both individuals are perfectly tuned to the importance of community in a part of the world where communities are small and stand-alone.

I attended Grandparents Day at our grandson's school in Wayne, Pa., a few weeks ago. Some of you may be familiar with Lancaster Avenue, which we relied on over a few days to get us around Philadelphia's Main Line. We were in Wayne and Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Radnor, Ardmore, Villanova – all over the place – as I rode along with my daughter between pickup and dropoff at schools and whatever else. It was a punishing collection of traffic lights, road work and pedestrians.

And, these days, even after spending years in that area, I lost track quickly of where I was at any given moment, unless I was waiting at a light next to Villanova University.

The fact is, the Main Line is all one town. One giant community. One monument to suburban sprawl. Wayne was an outpost on the Main Line once upon a time. Not anymore. It looks like the rest of them. It merges seamlessly with the towns around it. Same glass buildings. Same Starbucks. Same Whole Foods.

Spend enough time in those suburban megalopolises, as many of us did carving out careers and raising children, and places like ours in rural New England are a tonic. There are obvious reasons – the landscape, rivers and lakes, the undulating country roads, the quiet and the absence of traffic lights (but not roadwork) – and the less obvious, the happy surprises, the popups.

The happiest of those surprises may be encountering a café in a small town, with a decent array of baked goods or other morsels to eat, things to drink and a comfortable place to sit, inside or out. A few locals, on a first-name basis with the people behind the counter and with each other, drift in and out while you sit at the table and think about what it would be like to live there.

California has winding roads and small café s in small towns, but I do not know anyone who goes there to experience them unless they live there. People travel to Napa to be delighted by a new red or white, or along the coastal highway to watch the sunset over the Pacific. If you have not experienced them, I recommend either adventure for a taste of grandeur.

A blood-orange sun sinking on the horizon of a vast ocean or waves of vineyards carefully pruned and manicured is rich, which is precisely how to think about it. You can look, but you cannot touch.

We share what we have here differently in small, unique packages curated over the years by people who live above the store in towns along the way. And as long as the chain of those people remains unbroken, everything else about us survives.

See you sometime at Fiddleheads.

Jarvis Coffin and his wife Marcia owned New Hampshire’s oldest inn, The Hancock Inn, during which time he wrote a popular newsletter for the inn’s mailing list. Retired from innkeeping, he now writes full-time, mostly essays on rural life and fiction. You can reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and visit postcard-from-monadnock.ghost.io to keep up with his other musings on the Monadnock region.

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