Letter From the Editor: A Few Black Boxes Around Town

There are moments when something you’ve been working on suddenly feels real. For me, one of those moments happened this month when The Lake Bluff Chat got its own newspaper boxes.

They’re old-fashioned, black newspaper boxes — the kind that feel as though they should have been sitting on a village sidewalk forever. There is one at the train station now and another outside Hansa, filled with copies for anyone who happens to walk by. Seeing them there made me ridiculously happy. Until that moment, The Chat was something I made. Somehow, putting it into those boxes made it feel like something that belongs to Lake Bluff.

It also seems fitting for this particular issue. I’ve been thinking a lot about small things lately, and about how often they turn out not to be very small at all. Two young girls cut their hair for children who have lost theirs to cancer. The Lake Bluff Fire Department helped make a wish come true for a little boy. Farmers load trucks before most of us are awake and drive hours to spend a Friday morning on our Village Green. None of these things will make national news. That’s exactly why I love putting them in ours.

It’s really the idea behind Tiny Joys, but it’s also becoming the idea behind this entire little paper: paying attention to the things that could easily be missed.

And now there are a few black boxes around town helping me do it.

If you pass one, take a paper. Better yet, take one for someone else.

I’ll keep filling them.

In community,

Megan Paszczykowski