Just in case you missed the memo: Today is Friday! Yippee!! I haven’t linked-up with Chelsea in a while so today I’m jumping on the “Tell Me Something Good” Train and talking about my town! (I was a little inspired by Steph’s post last week.)
Maybe all towns are like this… but when I was in school all my classmates were hell bent on “getting out of this place.” I started dating K when I was 17, but I still thought we’d both leave my little town and settle in Pittsburgh or Nashville. (I don’t know why I thought it’d be either of those two cities, but I did.) In the summer of 2012, right before my college graduation and less than a year before our wedding, K decided to start a business. And that pretty much sealed our fate in this small town.
We’ve joked about moving to Texas (K’s market is really strong there & being in the “center” of the US would be beneficial), but that’s not going to happen because A) I love snow and B) I love snow. So here we stay.
At one point in life I thought that this might mean that I failed; I’d failed to see the world & escape my hometown. I have high school friends in Cleveland and Columbus, college friends that now live in Arizona and Japan, and my brother is getting ready to permanently settle a few hours away… but I left for three and a half years of college and came right back here. ‘How pathetic,’ I once told myself.
But I was oh so wrong. Deep down, I’m a big fan of this small town I grew up in.
- We have a delicious coffee shop that resides in our cute little downtown square.
- I never feared for my safety in my small high school.
- Our local park offers ball fields and summer rides and fireworks.
- I pass “first date” locations and my teenage hangouts all the time- and it brings back a lot of good memories.
- I can drive by my childhood house when I’m feeling nostalgic.
- My parents and K’s parents are less than 10 minutes from us. Same with all our grandparents.
- While we’re a fairly small town, we do have a lot of big businesses- and it’s a painless drive to get to larger neighboring cities.
- When our out-of-town friends visit their families “back home”, they call us up and we get to see them.
- From our house I can walk to my job, K’s business, the local high school, or the park- in under 15 minutes.
- The housing market is inexpensive.
And of course we can always leave and travel and visit others… and we get to come right back to our little community. It’s a peaceful place. We don’t have public transportation. We’re 20 minutes from the cute little Amish towns. And there’s plenty of grass for our dogs. You don’t always get that in a big city.
If K woke up tomorrow and said, “Let’s move!” I’d probably be on board, but if the furthest move we ever make is from in town to the countryside out of town, I’ll be happy, too. And I think it’s good to be at peace with that 🙂
Linking up with Chelsea for “Tell Me Something Good!”
Life as Louise 
See now, I’m envious of your contentment (not that I don’t love my adoptive home!)
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Ha! Sometimes I DO wish my hometown was closer to fabulous cities or smack-dab in the middle of Europe 😉 But for the most part I’m appreciative of my Ohio roots 🙂
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Gah! I wish I had your contentment to live in the same town that I grew up in. I’ve spent the last 10 years running away from it, but my family keeps me coming back pretty frequently but I still can’t shake this feeling that if we end up back there that I’ve somehow failed. I LOVE my family but it’s not worth the small town shenanigans that I’ve left behind. I do joke that if I moved back it would have to be on the outskirts and I’d have to have high speed internet because I’m in NO way going to the grocery store or anywhere else because I hate small talk with people that I don’t actually care about(wow, that sounds more bitchy than attended.)
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No, no, no. I TOTALLY get it. (It’s the small town curse.) There are plenty of times I avoid an aisle at the grocery store or nix a restaurant because I know an old “friend” now works there. And for as many wonderful memories certain spots hold, there are many locations that bring up AWFUL memories.
We’re happy to be here because some day we’ll be able to raise our kids in a safe environment and, right now, we have 4 different family members that can take care of the pups when we travel 🙂 I have every intention of moving out to the country, though! Haha!!
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I love small towns or when people stay in their home base.
We have moved across the river & my house now is about 40 minutes from my old stomping grounds & I love going back & seeing it – full of memories. It would be neat to still be there…
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It’s funny, because my grandpa grew up 10 minutes from our town and my grandma grew up about an hour north, but then they got married and moved all over the world (from Okinawa to Texas) for the air force. My mom was born in Dover, DE and ended up at a college in OH while her family was in Chicago. She met a friend of my dad’s there and came home with her to this town & met my dad. Then my dad ended up at the university (and I did, too eventually) and they fell in love and got married and settled here. And after my brother and I were born my grandparents relocated here from Chicago.
My family has a weird history with this town/Ohio. Haha!
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we stayed very close to home too. both my husband and I are from the same town, and right now we live in st. paul, thirty minutes from our hometown. we are some of the only friends in our group who have stayed in the state, so we get to see friends when they come home too, such a nice perk. we’ll probably move back to our town once we outgrow our tiny city house, and although once upon a time I would have hated myself for that, I love it now.
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It’s wonderful to see friend when they visit “home.” We don’t have to travel far for holidays either. (A curse and a burden… 😉 ) It’s funny how we considered staying a failure- especially during those teenage/early adult years. It took a long time for me to be ok with staying here.. But I can always travel and see the world. And we could always move; this is just the place for us right now 🙂
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Your town sounds lovely and nothing wrong with living there. I have always been a little jealous of people who grew up in one hometown, although I wouldn’t give up my experiences. I grew up in the military, so we never lived in one place more than a few years. It did give me a sense of adventure, though, and I like the idea of moving. But if I found a town like yours that I loved I would not want to leave.
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Thanks, Jess 🙂 My mom was an air force brat and she doesn’t really have a hometown either. I inherited my love of travel and adventure from her and my appreciation of my roots from my dad (although he likes to travel, too) 🙂
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My hometown is tiny too! I’m not living there, but being in Portland now we’re only an hour away and we’ve been going and staying with my mom every weekend lately. I wish there was any town/city we could live in and be 10 minutes away from both of our parents though, so that is a huge plus for you! I totally love small towns.
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It’s really nice having parents close by, though our holidays become hectic. Haha! Sometimes we travel through small towns with cute little brick buildings in the square and I think, ‘This is so cute!’ I never really equate my town with being a cute small town, but it really is 🙂
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i definitely relate to that feeling of ‘am i a failure?’ but for me it was about choosing to come back. am i going backwards? shouldn’t i be moving forward? but NO! i made the choice and it’s the right one for me. so glad you love and appreciate the place that holds so many memories with more to come!
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When I graduated college K already had an apartment here that we’d picked out together so I don’t think I ever made the conscious decision to come back, but when we started his business a few months prior we did sit down and say, ‘OK, if we do this we’re basing the operation out of this town….’ so it was a pretty big factor then.
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Amarillo in Texas does get a decent amount of snow and still has a small-town feel. 😉 In all seriousness, I love that you are content living in the same place you grew up. I’m moving close to where I grew up in a few months, and it’ll be a little weird since I’ve been gone!
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I can’t remember where K said he’d want to live… maybe Fort Worth? If he could get me close to some mountains I GUESS I could stand the Texas heat 😉 I’m a sucker for mountains!
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Wow. You’ve almost convinced me to move! I think it must be a really wonderful feeling to be so comfortable and appreciate and acknowledge the values of your town. Although…you never tell us the town! (is that on purpose for safety reasons?)
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Haha! It’s kind of on purpose 🙂 I’m sure that I’ve let it slip once or twice on here or Twitter. Usually I just say it a smaller town in NE Ohio that’s roughly between Columbus, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh 🙂
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