By Madeleine Frank Reeves

Shout it from the water tower: The “call of small” is a very real thing, and it’s not limited to tiny houses or compact travel trailers—although we love those, too. The pare-down movement has inspired literal movement, with upwards of 30 million people—many of them, surprisingly, millennials—now calling America’s 27,000 small towns home. (Good for them; bad for the person on population sign duty.) But even if you can’t pick up and move (yet!), you can embrace the leisurely paced, know-your-milkman, “Main Street” mind-set wherever you put down roots.