Growing up in a small town made up of just over 2,000 people, I always thought I hated it. It was two hours to the closest shopping mall, thirty minutes to a retail store, and over one hour to a city with a population of over 10,000. My town has only one restaurant that delivers, and we call our grocery store "the store" because that's really all we have. It seemed to me that growing up in a small town was awful, until I started talking to my friend who grew up in a city of 61,000 that I realized living in a small town was actually pretty cool.

Sure, we don't have a lot of entertainment resources. But what we lack in resources, we make up for with people (all 2,000 of them). How many kids in the world can say that they grew up in a high school where they knew every single person in their grade, let alone their entire school? Personally, after graduating high school, I can probably tell you at least one fun fact about each student in my grade, most of their middle names, and where they went off to college. A backpack or coat could be left out in the hallways and you would know exactly who it belonged to. In a small school, teachers were more like friends. I can remember my friends and I calling up one of our English teachers for help with English homework from another class. There's also the classic "You know, I used to teach your mother when she was a student here," and every student with a brother or sister has experienced, "you're John's little brother, aren't you?" or even accidentally being called by their sibling's name by a teacher. Sure, sometimes everyone knowing everyone else at school isn't always the greatest thing, but it's definitely an experience I wouldn't want to change for the world.

Driving in a small town is always a fun experience, too. Instead of honking at other vehicles out of annoyance, people are honking because they see someone they know. It's not uncommon to see two cars stopped in the middle of the street and the drivers talking to one another. And really, you can drive in the middle of the road and no one could care (because there's no lines on the road to tell you otherwise anyway). I go to the grocery store in the winter and see all sorts of cars in the parking lot unlocked and running while the owners are inside shopping to A) keep their car warm in the cold winter temperatures and B) they know no one will steal their car. And if you grew up in a small town up North, you've gotten your stuck car out of snow at least a dozen times.

And the community, man oh man. Just last week I remember telling someone, "my old boss was also my middle school secretary and her daughter is in my class and she lives three houses down from me." If that isn't a small town sentence, I don't know what is. You practically know who everyone is, everyone is extremely friendly, and everyone gets annoyed with the tourists that come around every summer (and it's extremely easy to point them out, too). You will see practically the entire town's population at high school sports games, and the entire town is proud of the players as well. There can be times when the bars or an event is playing live music, and you can hear it across town. Even though "across town" is really only ten blocks. I see kids running the streets and sidewalks, playing with the neighborhood children or strolling down the street to go to their friends house. And the parents are more concerned with them possibly getting a scrape on their knee than them going down the street by themselves. Small towns, especially the one I live in, are so safe it's unbelievable. There are no sketchy places, and no sketchy people.

To add a personal story of how small towns are so amazing, this past Winter I was rushing around downtown to help my coworker search for his dog that had gotten lost. I would pull over to anyone I saw walking on the side of the street and ask them, "hey, have you seen a loose golden retriever at all?" and more than half of them replied, "no, but give me your number and if I see him I'll call you" and whipped out their cell phone to add my number. At the end of the night, after we had found the dog, all I could think of was, "that would only happen in a small town." And it truly would, and I wouldn't change it for the world.