Do you ever listen to a song and you can just relate to it so much? Then you repeatedly listen to this song because it brings back memories, memories you don’t want to forget, but even sometimes memories you wish you could. And if you’re anything like me, you listen to this song on repeat and dissect every word and how it relates to you. Lately, I have been listening to a song called "My Town" by Dylan Scott where the lyrics of this songs are spot on to my hometown.
The song starts out by saying..
“Football lights, Friday nights. Don't play no more. But that's still my team.”
Even though people have graduated they still go to all the football games on Friday nights and you bet ya, they cheer on the team just as if they would if they were in high school again. Heck, you might even see them at practice talking to the coach and helping out just for the fun of it. As you get older and graduate, you are the athlete all the younger players look up to so they love to see you come back and support them. They still see this team as their own because once a Warrior always a Warrior.
“Spent most of my years in these ten square miles. It's seen all of my tears, it's seen all of my smiles. I always said I wanted to leave. Now it's the only place I want to be.”
Even though my hometown is only 2.452 square miles, you can most definitely say you spent most of the years of your life here because very rarely did people leave to go to other schools or new people move into our town. It has seen all of our tears and all of our smiles. There have been some devastating times where everyone came together as a community, but also many smiles and great memories are made here. For example, just like recently we had a wrestler make history and win state, on social media you saw people of all ages congratulating this wrestler and supporting him.
The next two lines I have never related so much to, growing up I always talked about how much I could not wait to leave Carrollton as did everyone else. Somehow I ended up back close to home and I go home on the weekends whenever I am free. Most people never leave Carrollton and start their own families here. Guess there is something about your hometown you just can’t ever let go of or even leave.
“This is my town, this is my town. There ain't an inch of road I ain't been down. This is my town, this is my town. Long as I'm living I'll be hanging 'round. It's the middle of nowhere, But I call it home. I ain't afraid to say it loud and proud. This is my town, this is my town.”
Anyone from Carrollton can agree when people ask you where you are from, you refer to it as my town and explain where Carrollton is. You don’t explain it as you are ashamed of the small town in Northeast Ohio you are from, but rather you say it proudly and start to talk about all the unique things Carrollton has to offer. Even sometimes you will joke about it saying things like “the place where the farm animal population is larger than the people population”. Which may or may not be true. Or we even have our own lingo sometimes such as saying things where people who aren’t from Carrollton don’t understand, for example, if I were to be at a football game and tell people I am going to go to the eat-stand, they would know I meant concession stand, but saying it when in college people look at me like I was crazy and have no idea what I am talking about. No matter what at the end of the day, when people ask you where you are from, you think of home which is Carrollton, Ohio.
“Everybody knows everybody. And everybody knows me by my first name.”
Most people grow up in Carrollton and start their families in Carrollton, so when your kids go to school they are going to school with people you grew up with kids also. Everybody literally knows everybody. You can’t go to the store or even the gas station without seeing someone you know, and even if you don’t know them enough to speak to them you know their name and who they are.
“As the world gets complicated. We just try to keep it simple. And stay the same. “
I hate to say this but my hometown is naive so to speak, but not all in a bad way. We keep everything simple, and by that I mean we keep everything the same. We are a small conservative town where everyone seems to think alike to a point, and we rarely change anything. If change does occur everyone seems to be unhappy about it, like when the Oil and Gas companies came in and caused a lot of traffic for our town, people weren’t the happiest.
“There's dirt on them roads, I don't want them to pave it”
When the oil and gas companies came in and started drilling for oil they started to pave the back roads. When they started to pave the dirt roads to handle the constant traffic and new truck routes, people were unhappy because we like our back roads and having no traffic to get places quicker than the main roads.
The song ends by saying...
“It's the middle of nowhere. But I call it home. That's what I'm all about. It's where I was raised. At the end of my days. It's where they'll lay me down. This is my town, this is my town. There ain't an inch of road I ain't been down, This is my town, this is my town. Long as I'm living I'll be hanging 'round. It's the middle of nowhere, But I call it home. I ain't afraid to say it loud and proud. This is my town, this is my town. Oh, this is my town”
I may not be living here my whole life, like some people, but no matter where I end up in life I will always refer to my hometown as Carrollton, Ohio. This is my town, where I grew up, it may be the middle of nowhere, but I am proud to call it home.
