Since no one ever knows exactly where your town is, you just say it’s _____ minutes or hours from Boise and what direction. Then people nod their heads, pretending that made a difference. Along with trying to explain it's location, here are other signs you grew up in a small town:

1. You could never use traffic as an excuse for being tardy because there never was any traffic.
2. But you could say you were stuck behind a tractor.
3. When you said you were going to "run into town" it meant anywhere there was a Walmart.
4. When you come home for breaks it means avoiding any and all public places unless you are mentally prepared to be drilled 5 million times with questions that just stress you out. "How's school going?" "When will you graduate?" "Have you got a boyfriend?” Good. I don't know, hopefully never. No, but thanks for reminding me how single I am....again.
5. Because even in that sketchy restaurant behind the 2nd hand store, people would be there that knew you.
6. Knowing how to even get to that restaurant.
7. Everyone has a slight hatred for Fruitland because they owned every sport, and even if your school didn't play them, you knew who they were.
8. You could keep tabs on everyone because everyone knew everyone. Even your best friend’s aunt’s cousin’s sister’s daughter's hot boyfriend.. which you did because you were waiting for him to be single.
9. Your basketball coach was also your science teacher, occasional life therapist and Facebook friend.
10. That one time you got out of a speeding ticket because the cop's girlfriend just got hired as your boss (or was that just me?).
11. When the same cop two years later saw you home for summer and told you places hiring... including the bar.
12. You learned how to drive way before your feet could touch the pedal.
13. Playing in the mud and getting a little dirty never bothered you because that was your childhood.
14. You may not have been officially hired, but every summer you were unwillingly employed by your parents (so most of us got real jobs.) If unsupervised lifeguard-ing in bikinis counts as a real job.
15. Birthday parties consisted of random games like carrying buckets of water with you as you ran down the scorching hot black asphalt road barefoot to see who could make it the farthest, or sleeping out on the trampoline to meet up with the neighbor boys after you prank called all of your friends.
16. You learned the circle of life and survival of the fittest way before school even started because you were surrounded by animals and probably hunted and fished since you could hold a gun and rod.
17. If you had the "right" last name, it had more pull than just about anything else.
18. Everyone told directions by using landmarks: "You just turn by that ditch that has the dead tree that's about to fall over."
19. You had to drive half an hour to go to a movie theater.
20. If there was a tragedy, the entire town was on your doorstep within an hour offering food and comfort because a small town is basically a really really large extended family.
21. The friends you graduated with were the kids you met in elementary, or before.
22. If you got a subway, you were moving up in the world.
23. Your teachers were on a first name basis with your parents; therefore, you either got away with everything or nothing at school.
24. When you left, all of those country songs about back roads and pond swimming pools and leaving tattoos on your town all made sense.

And now, a senior in college, I realize that I honestly wouldn't have traded growing up there for anywhere else... even the magical town of Boise.