If we are to return to small, local, diverse economies, we will do it only with the aid of community rememberers. Community rememberers are not likely to be known as such. These are men and women who know a place inside and out not because they've formally studied its history, researched its genealogies, or interviewed its residents, but because they've experienced it. They have a memory of the place like a blackjack oak remembers the dirt within which its roots are nursed and out of which it ascends and flourishes. They know everyone's ancestry because their lives are filled with memories of marriages and births, deaths and funerals, school days and summer jobs, each of which fashion richly detailed town histories and family trees that are not easily forgotten, nor are they easily transmitted. Such memories are a heritage, a trust endowed over the course of a lifetime. They are bestowed by the story of the land itself upon those who have earned such remembrances by dedicating the entirety of their experiences to a single place.

I am fortunate to come from a line of community remembers. My dad, my granddad, and my great aunt are people how have absorbed the story of their place. Their conversations are peppered with references to family lineages, changes in land usage, and transitions in local history. These sorts of details are rarely introduced as the subject of any discussion. Rather, each added detail simply provides the context for local gossip, news, jokes, weather, Sunday drives, exchanges after church, interactions in the grocery aisles, or conversations on the far side of dinner, long after the table has been cleared. They wear their memories like an old shirt. Comfortable on their shoulders. Faded and unassuming. Nothing to be noticed. Certainly nothing to be fussed over or impressed with.

Perhaps this is the principal difference between the community rememberer and the historian. For the historian, the memory is the subject, the thing itself. Getting the information is the goal. For the community rememberer, the memory is the means to a different end. It is the place - its story of people and land - that is the subject. The place's continually unfolding narrative is the never-realized, always-changing but ever-the-same end. Community rememberers belong to the place, and their memories are a sort of deed or title, the evidence that they are where they are supposed to be. They've been baptized into a local story, and their memories are the evidence of the sacrament.

Local economies have always depended on such rememberers. They are the ones who know which fields do well in corn and which do well in alfalfa. They are the ones who know that in order to get anything done in town you have to get old Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so on your side. They are the ones who protect the values and convictions of their place, because it is those values - right or wrong - which have made them who they are. And they love who they are. They cannot hold the memories of their place without being emboldened by them, proud because of them. They know the heartiness of a memory, its way of preserving a community and its people through hard times. Without them, we have no story. Without them, we have no place.