We humans love a milestone. We put candles in things. We buy cards. We make videos set to sentimental music. We post then-and-now photos and marvel at the hair, skin, and body we had the nerve to complain about. We announce that it’s been five or 10 or 25 years since something happened, as though we weren’t there for all the Tuesdays in between.
We also make five-year plans, which feels adorable in retrospect. The confidence! The audacity! Here we are assigning goals to someone we haven’t even met.
Five Years From Now Heather will apparently be ridiculously fit, have written the novel everyone keeps asking about, and be living overseas because Future Heather is both disciplined and spontaneous. (She sounds delightful. I look forward to meeting her.)
Five years is plenty of time for jobs to change, kids to grow up, businesses to open and close, to fall in love, lose someone, change your mind, and discover that the thing you thought would ruin everything somehow did not. And almost none of it happens on schedule.
That’s the part milestones leave out. We celebrate the big dates, but the story happens in the middle. On unremarkable Wednesdays. In conversations we didn’t know were important. With people who were, at the time, just some person. We rarely know we’re standing in a Before.
You’re drinking coffee. Running late. You say yes. Or no. You meet someone. Take a chance. No confetti cannon announces: PAY ATTENTION. THIS WILL MATTER LATER. (Honestly, wouldn’t that be helpful?) Years pass. Eventually we realize that ordinary day became a dividing line. Everything before it. And everything after.
Maybe that’s why I remain unapologetically in love with making a magazine. In a world built to refresh, scroll, and move on, we make something meant to last. We put people on pages, take beautiful photographs, and give a moment a place to stay. Years later, we can hold yesterday in our hands. While the world rushes forward, a magazine quietly refuses to disappear.
So when The Local turned five, we did what milestones invite us to do: We stopped. Looked back. Paid attention. Then we pulled out the old issues and went looking for what happened next.
And what I love most isn’t where we started. It’s seeing how much life happened in between. What surprised us. What broke our hearts. What made us laugh. What lasted. All those ordinary days added up to something worth remembering. And for five years, these pages have held onto some of them.
Somewhere in Winter Garden, someone is meeting a person, taking a chance, or having an ordinary Wednesday they’ll someday point back to and say, “That was the beginning.”
Maybe even you.
Heather Anne Lee
Editor
