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It has certainly been a challenging year to be a small business owner in Farmville. The effect of COVID-19 has reduced consumer traffic, brought crowd size mandates and generally made things more difficult in many ways.

Toss on top of that a flood for many businesses near the Appomattox River and other smaller waterways throughout the town.

While some area flood experts poopooed this 2020 flood as nowhere near as bad as the great flood of 1972, if you have water in your business, history doesn’t really matter much at that point.

Farmville’s small businesses have been resilient throughout 2020. There have been creative solutions to doing business during the pandemic and a determination to quickly return to operation as usual once the flood waters receded.

That resilience was perhaps best represented in a Facebook Live video by Appomattox River Company General Manager Brian Vincent, commonly known as Vince, Friday morning, Nov. 13, while walking viewers through the business’ warehouse where workers were cleaning things up even while the dungeon area of the warehouse remained full of water.

“Big moment here in Farmville, but like all the rest of the businesses here in Farmville, we are just going to keep on trucking. Right? Put your gloves on, get to work. Put your mud boots on, start cleaning up and get back after it.”

That’s what we do. Farmville has become accustomed to picking itself up, dusting itself off and moving forward.

We are a resilient town with people who are not easily discouraged.

It will take much more than a pandemic and a little flooding for 2020 to keep Farmville down.

(The views in this editorial are of The Farmville Herald editorial staff. This editorial was written by Editor Roger Watson. He can be reached at Editor@FarmvilleHerald.com or (434) 808-0622.)