Bucolic, yes, but in a cosmic way.
You are where smallness quietly thrives because it dreams as big as the maple they named you after.
You may be 123-strong, trending toward 12, but I’m betting on 1,234 some day, once you dig deep enough to remember when you were Peteon and Homer penned you in his Iliad.
You are a hamlet with a church, an outlier within the hierarchy of settlements, for only towns and villages can aspire toward a place of worship. Why this privilege? Your pastoral double life, perhaps. The monks who called you home before the goatherds and shepherds ministering to today’s flocks.
You are averse to commerce, not one merchant save two meat taverns, yet you trade in resourcefulness and ingenuity — enterprising men and women, modern-day Archimedeses, forging an inventive daily existence solely from the land and materials who will never know a landfill.
You are the story mythology forgot, the one about how you fashioned the fifth wind, an epic wind that flies in the face of cardinal direction.
You are nestled in the eye of simplicity itself, surrounded by a ring of mountains, orbited by olive groves Hercules might have ambled in, cradling the radial line between sunrise and sunset.
I am thousands of kilometres away from where I normally spend my days tickling the keys of my laptop. My fingers are too swollen from the heat, and overeating, for the smaller device I am using to capture your quiet smallness. They are disinclined to touch one letter at a time, resulting in inarticulate ligatures.
All the same, I keep typing, until the words come out right.