Having lived in a small town during my teen years and after, I’ll be the first to admit that there are pros and cons to small town life. But I’ll also admit that I love writing books set there. Why? Maybe because it’s fiction, and I can show all the pros and skip the cons. You know, all the coziness of a small town without the gossip and everyone knowing everyone else’s business. Oops! I shouldn’t be telling tales, should I?
I was born in the big city and spent my early childhood there. Not BIG big city. Presently, our population is half a million, but that includes those surrounding bedroom communities. You know, some of those small towns. When I was twelve, we moved from the city to a small town where my mother was born and filled with relatives. Every time I mentioned someone from school, my mom would ask who “they belonged to”. More than likely, she knew something about the family, if not that we were somehow related, even in shirttail fashion. I became comfortable with it after a time and learned to adjust to a new style of life—a life full of cousins and knowing everyone and having lots of fun. Even better, I spent six years in the same school, more than I’d ever spent in one school before. It was heaven. Being a bit ornery, when my daughters attended school there later, I loved playing the “cousins” game with them, just as my mother had with me.
But after returning to that small town following my divorce and twenty-four years on a farm, I started to see a side to the town I’d never realized and wish I’d never known. Even my daughters noticed things had changed. So we’re back in the big city again, we being myself and my daughters, and I love having fast food within a few blocks, instead of a twenty mile drive away. I still miss the wide-open spaces of life on the farm and running in to friends in the small town grocery store. I’m saddened that the small town where I finished my youth became a refuge of city dwellers who eventually brought with them all the problems they should have left behind. I miss the small town it once was, so I fashion my fictional small towns on the good things I remember most. The funny characters who’ve lived there all their lives and make the town come alive, the friends who wave as you drive down the one or two blocks of “downtown” make small town living...comfy and warm and accepting.
Some of my best memories are of living in that small town, and I try to share some of those—although a bit fictionalized—with readers.
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6 comments:
YES! Yay you! Small town stories are so popular now, but I wonder how many writers actually have the background for it. You've been doing research all these years!
Sometimes I think that living in a small town all my life has made me uniquely suited to writing the stories I'm doing now. It hasn't made me uniquely suited for just loads of other things, but for this, I do think so. ;)
Great post. I love small towns and small town stories. I spent 5 years in a town with 500 kids in the high school including the 8th grade. It was small. I'll never forget seeing a picture of the entire varsity football team at one of their birthday parties when they were 5 years-old.
The good part is that even though we're spread all over the world, we're still close-we even have a group on facebook. The bad part was that in a small town, news spread faster than it took me to walk home from school. Invariably, I'd come home and I'd already be in trouble!
I remember when I was a kid living in the boonies and going into a country store. We called the man who ran it Goody and when you walked in the door there was a recliner and his dog - a chihuahua (sp?) was always in it.
I realize now, with houses close to mine, how I wish I was living out in the boonies again.
MarcieR
I lived in several small towns when I was a small child but the daddy got promoted and his job took us to larger cities. But one thing I remember about one of the small towns was walking with my mother and brothers to the railroad depot and watching the trains come through.
All the above. Plus we used to go to a Mom & Pop store weekly for candy. If we didn't have enough pennies, yes pennies, the store owner still made sure no one in the group was left out. Sweet man and wife. My friend and I walked everywhere, guess we didn't have a bike then. Once during a snow-storm, we walked from the grocery store to the drugstore for a cherry coke. The distance was almost from one end of town to the other. Took about thirty minutes. Our footprints were filled with snow before we got halfway to the beginning of our walk. By the time we arrived back at the grocery store, a neighbor picked us up and gave us a "Talking To." Ha. It takes a community to raise a child. A small town takes care of its own. Usually.
I have seen lot of small town but after know all this things I wandering...
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Robert
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