Everywhere place you go in life you will find that it has it's "norm". If you only been to a few places you don't know that something other then your "norm" exists. If you grew up in a small town you will find that your "norm" is quite different then the big city "norm" and only your fellow small towners can relate, because there truly is no place like home.

1.) YOU COULD HEAR FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS FROM YOUR FRONT PORCH
I am not even exaggerating on this one. In high school, I was on the dance team, so I had to be there by 2nd Quarter if I wasn't already at the field I would put my shoes on while eating on the porch so I could hear our announcer to determine how much time I had left to milk.

2.) WHEN DRIVING AROUND YOU START TO WONDER IF PEOPLE WALKING THINK YOU ARE STALKING THEM
It is true what they say, in a small town you really do just drive around to drive around. As hard as it may be to believe you can drive down every street in town very easily and when you are driving for hours at a time without leaving town you will find yourself going past houses 2 or 3 times or even worse you will find yourself accidentally follow your neighbor lady walking her dog. If you ever thought my friends and I were following you, I SWEAR we weren't

3.) TELLING SOMEONE WHERE YOU LIVE ISN'T AN EASY TASK
After being asked where you live, you usually have to name the closest big town before they have an even remotely have an idea of where you live. Even after you say that they give you this look like they are trying to think really hard and then you usually get some story how their cousin's dogs groomers fish talked about it once followed by a "yeah yeah I think I know where that is"

4.) WORD ABOUT THE NEW KID SPREADS LIKE WILDFIRE
Doesn't matter how many classes you heard or talked about them in every class that day you were going to hear someone say "who's the new kid?". Deep down you just wanted to shout the very obvious answer "NO ONE knows Patricia!!" but you don't, instead you keep your cool and wait for someone to spill the tea. I mean what else are you supposed to do when you don't know the answers? Wait for the real one? It also never seems to fail that the same people go after the new kids, every damn time...

5.) EVERY TEACHER YOU GOT KNEW YOUR SIBLINGS
You either had to fill a big role or blew their minds depending on the last sibling of yours they had. You were almost guaranteed to have to hear stories starting with "when I had you brother in class he". Its as if the only way they could connect with you is through your older siblings embarrassing or ridiculous stories. If you are the older sibling you heard a lot of "could you tell your sister" or "will you make sure your brother" Like excuse me but do I drive a minivan with four stick figures on the back?

6.) YOU STILL TALK TO THE KIDS YOU WENT TO KINDERGARTEN WITH
I graduated with a class of 16, OMG I know. Six of us were together K-12. If you handed me pictures of each of my kindergarten classmates, I would know every single one of them. Chances are I have all of them in the last 3 years. If they didn't graduate with us they just switched to neighboring schools.

7.) YOU FEEL WEIRD DRIVING BY AND NOT WAVING
In small towns everyone waves at everyone, even if you aren't sure who it is you wave. If they wave and you didn't everyone around you will all like "did you wave?". Everyone has also mastered what is called the "farmers" wave. Like do you ever learn to do that or are you just born with the instinct?

8.) RARELY DOES THE WHISTLE MEAN TORNADO
In fact, it was like the towns alarm clock in the summer you knew it was time to get the heck out of bed when you heard the 12 o'clock whistles and in the school year you knew it was time to get the heck home when you heard the 6 o'clock. If it wasn't either of those times something went down so if you weren't nosey you knew it was time to get the heck off the streets cause every nosey person (Basically the whole town) was about to be driving around to go find out what it was.

9.) MAKING THE LOCAL PAPER WAS NOT A RARE OCCASION
You probably made the paper like 267 times a year for every little thing. Most the time you probably didn't even know because you didn't do anything exciting but you were in it because every little thing goes in the paper. There isn't a whole lot to write about in a town of 857, therefore everybody has to take their turn of hideous new paper pictures.

10.) YOU ARE RELATED TO HALF THE TOWN
Chances are if you grew up their so did your Grandma and their cousin and so on. You end up with multiple spelling of the same last name or different pronunciations. Yet they are a related to the other one but "they are not the same ones" If you aren't related to your classmate you classmates related to 3 of your cousins on opposite sides. Their all the type of distant cousins that are so far the line your family gathering never actually involve seeing each other. All you know if that one of your dead relatives is related to one of their dead relatives.