On Place and Neighborhood

I suppose it's the mark of the provincial man, but in any case I find that I have a special and lasting love for this place, which is so obviously just a place, which has no particular beauty or grace or grandeur of scene, but which is, quite simply, a neighborhood, my neighborhood, a compound of sights and smells and sounds that have furnished all my years.

--Father Hugh Kennedy in Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness (1961)