American Falls, Idaho, is the ultimate American Small Town.

What do I mean by Small Town?: a brief parenthesis

For those who are not American–by which I mean the United States–“small town” doesn’t have quite the same connotations as “village.” A “village” sounds older, like it might have been there for a thousand years, whereas a small town, because it’s in America, is no more than 300 and often only 100 years old. “Village” also sounds more homogenous (is everyone related?), and more rural. A village might have feuds and unspoken rules in it that go back a millennium. A small town, while it is getting a start on these things, is basically a recent, frontier development. Though there are founding families, there’s also a lot more movement. City folk come in, start businesses, or get jobs as teachers. Newcomers arrive from other small towns. Children grow up and leave. Americans are very mobile, and the composition and atmosphere of a small town reflects that. There isn’t as rigid a class system as in most other places. And, though American Falls, for example, is the county seat, there’s also a lot less bureaucracy and fewer government jobs than in a town of comparable size in Asia.

On the other hand, a “small town” is definitely not the same as “hood” (short for neighborhood), which is a village-like section of a large city. Small towns are typically located in farmland.

Anyway. American Falls has the following: a river. A hydroelectric dam. A railroad to take farm produce away to be sold. A lot with silos, trucks, and piles of produce near where this railroad passes through town. Lots of churches. Post office, barber shop, mom & pop shops on Main Street (tree-lined), one of which is of course a bar. A hometown football team. Gracious parks, a golf course, and a nearby cattle lot that you can smell most days. Pizza, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants, because this is America after all. It also has a small hospital, though like most people I prefer to take emergencies to the city hospital 25 minutes down the road. Oh, and a community theater!

You can walk around American Falls during the day without fear. Law and order is maintained. The town is hilly enough that, on these walks, you can catch glimpses of all these small-town features and feel as if you just stepped into a slightly more modern, drastically less New England Norman Rockwell painting. Rising above the town, on the southwest side, is the Big State Highway, and, beyond that, the rolling foothills.

I felt I had to burst into this paean to American Falls in order to set the scene for the main point of this post, which is that a delightfully hippie shop has come to our small town.

An Art Shop comes to our Small Town

This is the interior of The Trove, which opened in American Falls in May.

Here we are looking towards the back of the shop. Notice that it features jewelry, leather goods, and paintings involving UFOs. And that the owners are fond of 78 records.

I first heard about The Trove from a person I met at the town festival this summer. This person, who was buying one of my son’s paintings, suggested that The Trove might be happy to carry our work, since its stated mission is to showcase local artists. Although we don’t live actually in American Falls, we figured we might be local enough to count. We headed straight from the town festival to The Trove, with the trunk of our car still full of paintings. Long story short, the owners of The Trove were amenable to this idea, and that’s why some of the paintings pictured above are by my son Andrew.

The mountain and the storm are my paintings, hung under the owner’s paintings of space and a (manatee?), over some quilts, and beside dish towels.

The Trove was even happy to carry a copy of my trilogy! So, if you ever find yourself in southeast Idaho, and want a touristy, artsy shop with lots of cool stuff, know that American Falls has one.