Hot in Cleveland? Nope! Hot in Wingham! - The Chaff with Scott Stephenson

At the beginning of each year, there is an expectation that intentions will be declared. This expectation is not enforced, exactly, but it lingers. It sits on the chest like a cat that has decided it lives there now. To ignore it feels rude. To satisfy it too clearly feels suspicious. The Chaff therefore offers, for the first issue of 2026, an intention that will take some time to reveal itself properly, both because time is required and because clarity has never been the point.

 

This year will be dedicated to a single project. It will not be a campaign, or a slogan, or a pivot. It will be physical. It will occupy space. It will have to be walked around, possibly brushed free of snow, possibly explained to visitors who ask what it is and why it is there. It will be the kind of thing that makes people say, after a pause, that they suppose it makes sense.

 

Wingham is a town that understands accumulation. Snow, yes, but also stories, reputations, assumptions. Things are said there, and then they stay said. Other things are left unsaid, and they stay that way too. Both approaches have their uses. Wingham has never been flashy about any of this. It has simply gone on existing, which is harder than it sounds and more impressive than it looks.

 

There is a habit, when discussing towns like this, of treating them as backdrops rather than actors. This is convenient for everyone else. It allows greatness to pass through without obligation. It allows harm to pass through without consequence. The Chaff has always found this framing a little thin. Places do not just witness things. They participate. They absorb. They remember, even when they would rather not.

 

Consider lineage. Not the grand, genealogical kind that gets printed on plaques, but the smaller, sturdier version. A woman named Margaret Hobbs was born in Wingham. She lived her life. She became a grandmother. This is not a mythic origin story. It is better than that. It is ordinary. From that ordinariness came a person whose face became a reassurance, whose timing became a standard, whose presence suggested that kindness and sharpness were not opposites but collaborators. Betty White did not need to be from Wingham for Wingham to be part of her story. This is how inheritance actually works.

 

It is also how responsibility works, though that part is less often discussed. Towns like Wingham are very good at producing talent and very bad at deciding what to do when talent leaves fingerprints behind. For a long time, there was a single narrative that dominated the room. It was quiet, authoritative, internationally-admired. It taught us that restraint could be thrilling and that domestic life contained whole universes. It was a source of pride that required no maintenance. It simply existed, polished and unchallenged.

 

That has changed. We will not rehearse the details. We will not name the name. Naming suggests closure, and there is none. What remains is a weight, newly distributed. What was once a straightforward source of honour now requires context, footnotes, long silences. It is still there, unavoidable, like a horror everyone knows not to point at but cannot help orienting themselves around.

 

The question facing any community in this situation is not whether to remember or forget. That is a false choice. The real question is what else will be allowed to stand. When one presence has dominated the landscape for decades, even its diminishment leaves a vacuum. Vacuums do not stay empty. Something fills them, whether by accident or design.
Here is where the proposal comes in, though it has been here all along, waiting politely. We propose to build a statue of Betty White.

 

There is something quietly radical about choosing warmth as a public value. Not sentimentality, not nostalgia, but warmth. Betty White represented a way of being that did not harden with age. She was funny without being cruel, confident without being loud, visible without demanding attention. She made room for others, including animals, including audiences who did not quite see themselves reflected elsewhere. This is not nothing. This is a civic contribution.

 

Throughout 2026, The Chaff will pursue this idea in its usual manner, which is to say indirectly, persistently and with more patience than sense. We will talk about materials, not because materials are the point but because they force conversations about durability. We will talk about location, not because there is a perfect spot but because every spot tells a different story. We will talk about process, because public things require public friction.

 

A town does not get to choose everything for which it is known. History is not that polite. But it does get to choose what it builds next. It gets to decide what kind of presence it adds to the room when the old ones start to feel heavy. In 2026, we propose to add one that listens, smiles and reminds us that decency is not naïve, it is skilled.