Dear World: I Am Standing in This Street With a Beer

How to belong in a new place ❤️ 🔪 🍺

I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.

---

You move to a new place.

How long does it take to feel like you belong?

Here at the farmhouse, I am slowly becoming a new person. There is no makeup. No heels. There are no 12-hour work days with laptops stuffed on knees.

There is less wine. Less wagyu. Less worrying about whether tucking in my shirt will reveal an unacceptable tummy pooch.

When you move to the country, you relax into yourself. Everything about you is…weirdly, calmly, okay. You discover that the red under your nostrils is okay, and the pudge around your armpits is okay, and the way you sometimes laugh a little too loudly when you’re nervous is totally okay.

People like you anyway.

You are wanted.

Here, my thick rubber green hardware store boots accompany me to buy hummus at the grocery store, and pick up sheet trays of buffalo wing pizza, and get a casual drink at the tavern, and even when I know the neighbors are coming over and I really should get dressed but I don’t want to get dressed, I wear them still.

This is life in the country: it is free.

I do not view this as letting oneself go (though my fingernails could use some polish); I view this as letting go.

There’s a difference.

(A digression: do you know what my favorite thing to wear with my muck boots is? Big, billowy dress pants that I shove inside that make me look like some kind of horse jockey. Which reminds me: my neighbor texted me the other day and invited me to A REAL AND ACTUAL HORSE SHOW. A horse show! I would love nothing more. You know the ones that have the caramel-colored hides and the thick, creamy white manes and the big, jolly hooves? Those are my favorite. There are three right down the road from the farmhouse, and I have secret names for them all, and this is apparently one more way that the countryside changes you: suddenly, you like animals??????)

---

Yesterday a friend came to do something that I can’t do in my muck boots: climb a tree and cut down a dead limb. This limb was savage. It had already broken off and was being held up by two little baby twigs, and the minute a strong wind came, it was taking out my power lines.

Clearly I can’t have that happen, not when I’m giving a live workshop next week & mispronouncing the word “niche” (because which way is it?!) and pretending like I am NOT wearing a pair of muck boots underneath my desk. (Just kidding, I am going to have to show them live on camera, aren’t I.)

Anyway, so he comes with his spiky tree-bark-climbing shoes (think soccer cleats on steroids) and his thick, sturdy ropes (with pulleys and clips) and his giant, menacing belts (Santa’s got nothin’ on this), and while I’m frantically placing LITERAL SEAT CUSHIONS under the tree like a total ninny (all I can see is the bluestone patio below), he’s scaling the side of this thing like he is a BEAR. I watch him go up, and farther up, farther up, and then he pulls a chainsaw out of his pocket and, thirty feet in the air, makes it look effortless.

We chat for some time and then he gets in his side-by-side—which, for the uninitiated, is like a golf cart and a monster truck mated—and drives the dirt road home across the hill. He doesn’t realize I have snuck $200 into his cup holder.

Later, I stop and pick up a sheet pizza for him and his family as a thank you, and the little girls are jumping on the trampoline and the baby is giggling and the adults are laughing and we talk for hours. After I left and was a mile down the road, they call and put me on speaker: “Look in your boot!” they laugh.

The same $200 was planted inside.

This is what it feels like to belong.

---

The elementary school bus driver, a woman, waves to me every day. I’ll be sitting on my porch with my laptop, and I’ll see her turn the corner down by the pond, and sure enough as rain, she waves. I like this very much. 

The fire chief also swings by the house, along with the township supervisor. I know them now, they were here when I tore down the barn. They are measuring the road, making marks with spray paint for a new drainage ditch. I grab three beers, and bring them over. We stand in the middle of the street, waving to passersby, drinking a Bud Light. “The lady with the red door died,” they tell me, somberly. She is one of my closest neighbors, the lady with the red door, though I can’t see her house.

On the topic of real estate, I tell the fire chief I want to turn the old firehall—a gorgeous brick building with big garage doors just down the street—into a local coffee shop. “Get me the hookup!” I tell him. And this is how business is done in small towns.

---

Speaking of business, I am working with a couple of local small businesses, teaching them how to sell their services like BALLERS. One is the stone mason. (Remember when I told him to follow his little shriveled up heart???)

So far, I have taught him how to:

• Go on an initial site visit & make them fall madly in LOVE with you. 🥰 (We stayed for coffee with a couple from Philadelphia and chatted amicably for an hour and found common ground and became the best of friends.)

• Write up an estimate that’ll delight the living hell out of ‘em. 🌷 (In one, he wrote “includes forming, pouring, finishing, stripping, sawcutting, and plenty of terrible jokes.” Making clients feel comfortable with you is SO underrated.)

• Quote with specific dollar amounts using exact calculations 📱, like $3,965.00, rather than a whole number that’ll feel slapdash and made up. ($4,000.)

• Offer clients multiple options, so it goes from being a “yes/no” decision to a “which one?” decision.💡 (My students have told me throughout the years that doing this one thing has dramatically changed their business forever.)

• Raise prices to a premium rate that appropriately reflects his skill, knowledge, and background. 👨‍🏫 (He is, by far, one of the most talented & technically advanced in the area, having studied the trade professionally and worked with major commercial contractors for the past twenty years. Remember this: people who are looking for great, are happy to pay you for great 🦄).

• Ask for—and get!—a 50% deposit up front. 💰 (This has COMPLETELY blown his mind. “People just…give it to you?” “Yes, when you show up like a pro.”) (And, um, cash flow is king.)

• Use modern technology to send invoices, accept credit cards, and even use a card reader. 💵 (He’s still living in a world that writes checks—ask me how I know. 🔪)

• Deposit the checks he does get into his bank by using mobile deposit, right from his phone. 🤳 (“THIS IS CRAZY!” he exclaimed.)

• Get his business listed on Google Business Profile so he shows up in local search results. 🔎 (“No one around here has this!”)

• Take professional before/after photos of his work. 📸 (He completed re-faced an entire home in natural stone—it was the home of our middle school English teacher, and it’s stunning.)

• Send clients progress photos so they feel seen & important & know everything’s on track 💯—but also you have documented evidence of how you left a site each day.

• Open a checking account specifically for taxes. 🏦 (He got caught this year with an unexpected bill, whoops.)

• Take photos of expense receipts 🧾—like at the hardware store—and upload them into an app like Shoeboxed for seamless write-offs & peace-of-mind organization.

• Schedule projects with plenty of space so you can relax and do an amazing, thoughtful, unrushed, thorough job, making clients feel like they are the ONLY client in the world. ←Another thing that is grossly underestimated, particularly when it comes to powerful word-of-mouth marketing that’s free.)

• Simply asking for online reviews. ✋ This has been a big lesson: the power of simply asking for what you need. It’s amazing what happens when you just tell people what you need. Most times? People will be happy to oblige.

The stone mason’s close rates went from 20% to 80% overnight, and he’s now got more cash flow coming through his bank account than he’s ever had in his life.

And I am having SO much fun. 🎉

Turns out? Belonging isn’t just about fitting in: it’s about helping other people stand out.

The more you volunteer your gifts, the more you will feel at home.

This is how you belong.

Which brings me to one final, fun-filled point:

Showing up as a leader & shining is one of the best things you can do for the people around you. You know the simplest way to do that? Share something new every day. Share your knowledge. Share your ideas. Share your advice. Share your thoughts. Share your work. Share your mistakes. Share your wisdom. Share your learnings. This is how you become known for something. This is how you become respected in your field. And this is how you market yourself with joy.

It’s not about selling, it’s about sharing.

Share something every day, whether it’s sharing on your Facebook page, or sharing on LinkedIn, or sharing with a neighbor, or sharing in a public forum (I’m trying to convince the stone mason to volunteer free workshops for the younger generation interested in the trade), or sharing via a local or online newsletter you start. (Highly recommend! Please come join me for the world’s most fun-filled 30-day newsletter challenge that I’m running during the month of May!).

STARTING SOMETHING FUN is the key to marketing yourself without making it feel like misery. 🤢 ANDDDD, this is also one of the weirdest skills to learn, because we are all shy, and we are all bashful, and we are all embarrassed, and we all have imposter syndrome up the ying yang.

But, do it anyway. Go, go, go.

You are wanted.

And if you aren’t excited to share or feel uninspired to share, may I suggest that perhaps you aren’t excited about your work? And if that is the case, then may I also suggest a change in your work?

CHANGE IS AWESOME, YOU CAN DO NEW THINGS, YOU ARE NOT A FAILURE, YOU ARE AN EVOLUTION. ⚡️

We are all slowly becoming new people.

We are all learning how to relax into ourselves.

And everything about you?

Is beautifully, delightfully, quirkily, happily, joyfully, blissfully OKAY.

Even if you have red under your nostrils, and pudge around your armpits, and a laugh that’s way too loud.

That’s what makes you wonderful.

That’s what makes you a gift.

And hell yes—you belong.