Bentonville is teeming with people during a recent First Friday, which has become an important cultural, if not civic ritual for people living and working close to downtown.  At times I feel as if I’m swimming upstream against a massive school of people, shifting sideways to traverse designer handbags, strollers and lives well spent — if this isn’t a sign of a society leapfrogging the pandemic.

After Judy Sabag’s husband passed away, she decided to move from their home in South Dakota to be near their daughter, Tina Hodne, and her family in Fayetteville.

Hodne, a real estate agent, thought Fayetteville’s historic district would be a good place for her mother to live because it would allow Sabag to walk to the library, Walton Arts Center and the Fayetteville Square. However, it was November 2020, the height of the pandemic, and nothing was available in that area. Hodne asked on Facebook if anyone knew of anything and immediately received a reply from the owners of a house two blocks from the square.

Ebony Mitchell has had the dream of becoming Miss Arkansas and then Miss America since she was a little girl, even dressing up as Miss America once. She grew up in Harrison, Arkansas, a town that has carried a negative reputation when it comes to diversity. But Ebony, a woman of color, said she never felt that negativity. “I didn’t even understand that Harrison had that reputation until I went to college and had others tell me,” she said. “I grew up with great people surrounding me in a single-mother home, with my brother, Caleb, and my sister, Rasheen. I’m the baby of the three.”