A few weeks ago, I visited a store that recently opened in my area, InchStone Books, and my first impression was exactly what every independent bookstore hopes to inspire: I wanted to stay.
The shelves were thoughtfully curated, the gifts were reading-adjacent in the best possible way, and the chairs looked like they’d been chosen by someone who actually planned for people to sit in them. The atmosphere had that particular quality that’s impossible to manufacture — the feeling that someone who loved books had arranged the place, and that whoever showed up would be welcome here.
The longer I lingered, though, the more I realized I wasn’t just visiting a bookstore. I was visiting a community, and that distinction matters more than it might sound.
The name itself is doing some work. InchStone was inspired by the owner’s special needs child and is a celebration of the small victories that don’t make headlines — a reminder that progress isn’t always measured in miles. Sometimes it’s measured in inches, and those inches still count. That philosophy wasn’t just a mission statement hanging on the wall somewhere; it was woven into every corner of the store.
There was a pay-it-forward coffee board, welcome materials for new visitors, loyalty cards, book clubs, and events — all of it sending the same quiet signal: you belong here. LGBTQ+ books weren’t tucked away on a separate shelf like an afterthought or a sensitivity warning; they lived within their genres, where readers could discover them alongside every other story. The children’s room also had a play area. Small craft kits and journals were tucked among the general fiction. Nothing about the space felt accidental, because none of it was. The store wasn’t merely selling books. It was creating conditions for connection.
As I wandered from room to room and browsed the shelves, I kept coming back to something I’ve been sitting with for a few years now: we are desperately hungry for places where we can simply be together.
Sociologists call these third spaces (sometimes third places) — not home (first space), not work (second space), but the in-between places where community actually happens: bookstores, libraries, coffee shops, community centers, game stores, churches, parks. These are the places where you run into your neighbor and end up talking for forty minutes about nothing in particular, and both of you leave feeling better than you did before.
For a lot of us, those spaces have gotten harder to find. We’re busy and exhausted and more connected than ever online, and somehow, loneliness has become one of the defining challenges of this particular moment in history. We know more people than our grandparents could have imagined knowing, and we feel it less.
That’s why places like InchStone matter, and not primarily because they sell books. They matter because they create the kind of environment where relationships can actually take root.
I’ve come to think that caregiving is bigger than most of us were taught to think it was. The obvious version — medical appointments, medications, meal trains, crisis support — is real and vital and absolutely counts. But there’s another kind of care that doesn’t usually get named as care, and it’s the kind that often prevents people from needing the crisis version in the first place. It’s the care that helps someone feel seen. The care that welcomes a person through the door before they’ve found a reason to ask for help. The care that says, without fanfare, “Pull up a chair. Stay awhile.” It’s the care that creates room for friendship and conversation and belonging, and it’s practiced quietly, in public, every single day in places like this one.
We love a dramatic act of generosity. We tell stories about heroic sacrifice and extraordinary kindness because those stories are genuinely moving and they deserve to be told. But communities aren’t built by grand gestures alone — they’re built through countless small acts, repeated over time, by people who just decided to show up and make things a little better. A prepaid cup of coffee. A comfortable chair. A friendly greeting on someone’s first nervous visit. A carefully chosen event. A shelf arranged so that the person browsing it can recognize themselves in the stories available to them.
Those things may seem small. And perhaps that’s the lesson hiding in plain sight: Care, like community, is offered one inch at a time.
Improv Invitation: This week, find one place that makes you feel welcome — and go back.