What Should Littleton Be Known For?
With a few exceptions, I’ve lived in Littleton, Massachusetts my entire life. I’d leave and come back, leave and come back. I am here now. Littleton has always been my hometown.
In December of 1973—a month before my third birthday—my parents, my 11-month-old sister, and I moved into the house my parents built with their own hands. In woods that abut conservation land, the only house of my childhood sits on a 10-acre lot that the seller was sure was unbuildable. Fifty years later, the house still stands, despite having been built by a nurse and an electrical engineer, who were—at the time of the house’s construction—both in their mid-20s, gainfully employed in their professions, and raising two very little girls.
My parents were tenacious. They worked hard. They built a great house.
That’s the sort of people I got born to. Those were the people who raised me.
Despite having lived a quarter of my life elsewhere (in various dormitories, on the third floor of a three-floor walk-up, in a cold-water flat, and, when Rob and I were first married, in a two-family house), for me, there is one house I think of when I hear the word “home.” I think of my house in the woods not by its color or design, not by the name of the road in its address; I think of it by its surroundings. To me, it’s the Oak Hill House.
Most of my life has been lived in that house in Littleton. I’ve slept for thirteen (cumulative) years under that roof, eaten 30,000+ meals at one of three tables, and my 16-year-old son was born in my bedroom (once and for decades my parent’s bedroom), thereby returning the balance of life and death back to neutral in the Oak Hill House, eight and a half long years after his Opa’s death downstairs.
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My hometown of just over ten thousand is divided into rough quadrants by a state highway running horizontally and an interstate cutting vertically. To accommodate these highways, Littleton has a great number of bridges. Fifty years ago, you could hear wildlife at night in the summer with the windows open. Nowadays, it’s highway drone 24/7. It would be a waste of time to lament this reality, though I often find myself wishing for a return to late-century quiet.
Today, that plot of land is 8.7 acres. After my father died—at age 52 of pancreatic cancer with his wife of thirty-one years and 27- and 25-year-old daughters at his side, my mother donated an acre of the land to Habitat for Humanity.
The community of Littleton came together and built a house for a stranger who is, still, twenty-some years later, my closest neighbor. In the winter, when the trees are bare, I can see the “Habitat House.” It reminds me how there are some people in the world who choose to do great things with their great grief.
A dozen years later, Littleton came together again and built a playground in memory of a little boy who accidentally died at his home. Our community embraced the great grief of a family whose little boy was gone. He’d been a neighbor to my family, just three doors down from us; his family’s home abutting the same conservation land as mine. Building that place of play and joy for children, in memory of a child, brought Littleton together. We shared our grief and our skills. Like the Habitat project, the building of Aidan’s playground brought the community together, and I’d say, made us better people.
I think we have a chance to come together again:
I’m 52 years old and have decided to work to end poverty for the people who live in Littleton, my neighbors.
Littleton’s poverty rate is 6.3%. This means that approximately two hundred twenty (220) households do not have enough resources to meet basic human needs, and three hundred twenty-six (326) households (9.3% of households) receive credit toward food purchases through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, whose COVID-funding, which helped lift many people out of poverty, was slashed in March 2023 federally and is set to be reduced in the commonwealth in the next short while.
People right here in Littleton will suffer from this future cut. People right here in Littleton will go back to choosing between food and rent, food and gas, food and medicine. Here, in Littleton.
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I think many of us come to a point in our lives when we look around and think, “You know, I have enough.” Many of us have passed that point and have begun to try to foist off our stuff on those who might be able to put it to better use. So many of us have so much in a place where people truly don’t have enough.
That’s heartbreaking to me, but from great grief, great things can be built. I’ve seen it happen before; I’ve seen it happen before in my hometown.
And so, here’s my plan:
In the next weeks and months, I will be constructing a plan to open the first retail cannabis store in the nation—specifically, in Littleton, Massachusetts—where 100% of the profits go directly to the people in Littleton who do not have enough money to meet their basic needs. These people who live right here with us, many working full-time jobs, still can’t make ends meet.
And yet the profit margins in the cannabis industry have made the rich-to-start a whole lot richer. Those who had capital and managed to leverage it within the nascent cannabis industry became obscenely rich individuals. They became obscenely rich because the money in this industry is obscene.
(More detail on this in a future Dispatch.)
For now, let me illustrate using those 326 SNAP households in Littleton and conservative sales estimates: Each and every one of those 326 households could receive ten bucks a day, every day, every day of the year.
(Sidenote: If you’re thinking, “That doesn’t seem like so much, Jenna,” you’re probably fortunate enough to live the sort of life that isn’t affected by ten dollars a day. Let me assure you, ten dollars is consequential to those less fortunate, living under the poverty line, here in Littleton.)
The money in cannabis is so obscene that I imagine there’d likely be plenty enough to also do things like fully fund the non-profit hunger-relief farm in town that struggles, year after year, to find enough grant money to stay afloat. Or maybe the surplus pays heating or medical bills for the poor. Or maybe Littleton makes sure that our poor and elderly have air-conditioners, which are becoming more and more a must-have in our ever-warming world.
And I’m sure you have ideas. I want to hear them.
We live in the same town as people who don’t have “the basics.” Here, in the wealthiest nation on earth in a town where the current average price to buy a single-family home is $813,444.00, there are people hurting.
That’s not right.
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First Dispatch: The Kings of Cannabis
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Jenna Brownson 