My sister, reading a travel guide to us on vacation, once said “[name of the town] ahead, don’t blink”. Took me a minute to figure that out.
You know your in a small town when:
The summer you break your leg the neighbors take turns mowing your lawn;
The postmaster delivers packages in his own car on Christmas Eve:
When your dog runs away the cops bring it back;
Traffic stops to let you get out of a parking place;
Every one you see on the street say hello;
When you leave a half a glass of beer on the bar when you go to the john and it’s still there when you get back;
When you go out of town for a weekend you leave the house open;
Somebody tells you when your kid gets in trouble;
Somebody tells you when your kid does something good;
If you stay home for a couple of days, somebody stops by to make sure you’re all right:
When there is a tragedy, you never have to face it alone.
Man, I couldn’t begin to tell you how small the town I live in is. My girlfriend and I have started cracking “you know you live in a small town when…” jokes for weeks now.
Here’s just one: my gf’s mom lives, works, and goes to the bar all on the same street, which is about three blocks long.
Another one is that I know everyone who works at the pizza shop by name. They’ll give me a free pie on a slow night, I’ve even got a tab runnning there. Heck, they just offered me a job!
The town that my Mom grew up in had only one road. It started out having about 100 people before WWII. It was in the former East Germany, most of the population left, now there are less than 50 people left. My grandmather was the mayor until the communists forced him to flee to the East.
We happened to be visiting at the time when the Soviet Union broke up. Only one person in the whole town had a television, so about thirty people crowded into that one house to watch the news.
My mother lives in Gooloogong, New South Wales. It has a pouplation of 250 (including the outlying farms, so there are even less people in town). When I go there once or twice each year, I am always greeted by name in the pub and shops.
One thing is weird: these small towns operate on a barter system. Not much cash is used. Everybody has a trade or some produce to sell, and the unit of currency is the “favour”. For example, my stepfather used to be a butcher, so farmers often call him and say, “G’day Merv. I’ve got five lambs which I need killed and butchered. You do it, leave me four, and take the other one for yourself”.
Coming from the city, I am in the habit of locking my car. BIG mistake in Gooloogong. I’m sitting in the pub, and one of the locals says jokingly to me, “Don’t you trust us? You locked your car!”
“How do you know I locked it?”, I reply.
“Coz I tried to open the back door so I could leave a box of surplus homegrown apples on your back seat”.
One cool town, that one.
As a kid I lived for a time in Kellerton, Iowa. Population around 200 if you included the dogs & cats. Only one paved road in town, all the rest were gravel. No stop signs, street signs, or even street names. 1 gas station, 1 bar, one general store. Kellerton plus Grand River made up the school system. If I’d stayed there, my graduating class would have been 12 people. Every property had an outhouse. The neighbor across the street didn’t get running water until 1976, and raised 5 kids without it! When my mom died and an ambulance arrived at the house, the softball tournament that was taking place stopped and everybody came to see what happened and offer support. I wouldn’t want to live there now, but it was a good place to be a kid.