Well, well, well.

If it isn’t yet another reinvention.

From the sweat-damp bucket seat of my old Prius, I stare in disbelief out my windshield at a storefront I hardly recognize. The last time I came to Nickel’s Market and Deli, the red-orange sign above the door had read “N el’s M et & D i” and the front window had been haphazardly adorned with white posterboard signs, each crookedly hung rectangle bearing a red-markered message about the week’s sales on six-packs or pork rinds or paper towels.

In fact, that isn’t just what it looked like the last time I came here.

That’s what it looked like every time I came here. All throughout my childhood, all throughout my adolescence.

But Nickel’s now is a different story, clearly—its once-dingy brick façade charmingly whitewashed, its new sign artfully vintage-looking and hung perfectly straight above the sparkling-clean front window. Instead of posterboard signs, there’s an Instagram-worthy display of seagrass baskets, each filled with fresh produce and rustic-looking loaves of bread, Mason jars full of jewel-toned preserves and jams.

“What the heck,” I mutter to myself, even though I shouldn’t be surprised. For months, it’s exactly this sort of thing that Bel has been banging on about—the various transformations in our once-unremarkable, slightly shabby hometown of Darentville, Virginia. The shops, the tourism, the redevelopment of land along the river—they’ve all drawn my best friend back here for her own brand of reinvention: city to small town, childfree to mom-to-be, in-the-office workaholic to remote-work part-time consultant.