Snorewood, Ontario, a town of 15,000, is nestled on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. The town boasts a charming downtown with historic brick buildings, eleven coffee shops, and a beautiful beach. Despite being dubbed the “second best beach in southern Ontario,” Snorewood embraces its position with pride.

A bedtime podcast told in gentle, unhurried episodes. Each episode takes place over the course of a single evening in Snorewood — following the town's residents as they wind down, close up shop, and drift toward sleep. Nothing dramatic ever really happens in Snorewood. That's the whole point. The humour is soft, the stakes are low, and the pace is slower than the lineup at the new artisanal pour-over place on Birch Street that only seats four people.

Snorewood, Ontario. Population 15,000. Founded 1847. Twinned in 1987 with a town in France that nobody in Snorewood has ever visited, though the sign outside Town Hall mentioning it is freshly repainted every spring.

The town sits on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, roughly equidistant between Toronto and Montreal — close enough to both cities that residents feel cosmopolitan, far enough that they really, genuinely are not. The lake is enormous and dark and beautiful at night, and on very clear evenings you can almost convince yourself you can see the far shore, though you cannot.

Downtown Snorewood is four walkable blocks of century-old brick storefronts. It has a hardware store, a pharmacy, a used bookshop, a seasonal ice cream stand that operates eleven months of the year because the owner, Deborah, tried closing for January once and felt strange about it. And it has coffee shops. Many, many coffee shops. At current count, eleven. For a town of 15,000. Nobody is sure how this happened or how they all survive. Economists from Queen's University have driven through and frowned.

Two blocks south of downtown, the beach begins. Fine sand, a long wooden pier, a snack bar that closes at six. In summer the tourists come. In winter the lake freezes in strange formations along the shore and the locals walk out onto the ice and stand there quietly, which is a very Snorewood thing to do.