Hey Aldean, I was raised in a small town. Let me tell ya' 'bout it . . .

[llmart]

77. I got a chuckle out of you saying your "small" town had a population of 8,000.

I grew up in a small town. Population at that time was about 665. Today the population is 1,665. Now that's a small town and I believe that when people talk about small towns, they're not talking about the suburbs of a big city. My town was as rural as they come. Situated right on the shores of Lake Erie it was nursery country because of the climate and soils. It still is. There was a school and a post office and a couple of bars (of course). There was no grocery store. No expressway. You had to drive to the next town over, about 20 minutes away to buy groceries. It was 100% white, though the nurseries brought in Puerto Ricans to work the farms.

As with all things, it had it's plusses and those were the wide open spaces us kids could wander for hours. None of the farmers cared if you played on their property. A farm behind our house had a huge pond and I learned how to skate on that pond and my brothers took a handline and hook and fished the pond. The owner's house wasn't even close enough to the pond to see us, but he wouldn't have minded anyway. We went to school with his kids. I am an outdoors nature lover to this day because of all the hours spent outside in my youth. Having said that though, we were relatively poor because my parents didn't own property and weren't farmers. My father would drive into the city whenever a job came up for him. The older I got the more stifled I felt there. I was one of the smartest in the class of 70 and I wanted to have access to more subjects but they never offered them. I found the library in the next town over and my mother took us there every weekend. The library was my saving grace. It made me yearn for a wider world. I couldn't wait to leave that small town. For most of my life I've lived in a suburb that had more amenities and was closer to a city that was large enough to have access to a variety of services that I never had as a young person.

I still have a nostalgic yearning for the small town of my youth, but I've been back and honestly, I know I could never live there again.
I went back for a reunion once and they were still talking about old high school teachers and getting together at the one diner still in town.