Small towns can be one of three things: a good thing, a bad thing or something in between.
A good small town are those you see in movies like "Pleasantville", "Footloose", "The Help", or pretty much any Nicholas Spark movie. But bad small towns are run down, extremely poor, and a "blink and you miss it" town. But those in between can be a mixture of the both. Taylorsville, North Carolina is one of those in between towns and I don't quite know how I feel about it.
Taylorsville, NC. Population: 2,063. The whole town is 2 square miles. Now compare that to New York City. You can fit Taylorsville 151 times into New York City and still have half a mile left over. Now this can be a very good thing because you get to know your neighbors, the people who you go to church with, the people you go to school with but then everyone and their brother knows your business. Unfortunately, small towns can have major downsides. The unemployment rate has been between 13.7% in 2006 to 6.7% in 2014. But what makes matter worse, almost 50% of all males who work in Taylorsville work in manufacturing. But since most of the factories have been moved to China, some of those men have lost their jobs and do not know anything else.
I have lived in Taylorville just a little more than 10 years of my life, so this is all I know. I use to love the small town life. I loved being able to drive and all you would see are trees, farms, small houses, and etc. It was so simple and I wasn't a fan of big cities at the time. Too loud, too crowded, just a little too much. I liked the larger towns for just a short period of time like a vacation but I would always want to go back home. But it was when I went to boarding school in Winston-Salem, NC that my feelings for home changed.
I was 14 at the time when I went to go live at boarding school and it was my first major time being away from home. I had gone to summer camps but they were out near the Pisgah National Forest away from big towns. But Salem Academy was different. There were more things to do now. I didn't have to drive 30 minutes just to go see a movie. I could walk downtown and have more than just a few places to eat, a small movie theatre, CVS's and a downtown that wasn't a mile long. Winston-Salem is no New York City but it was a start to introducing me to a bigger city life. So when I would go home for breaks, I started to have a problem with the small town life. It wasn't the same. It had began lost its natural feeling. I begin to love the concrete jungle instead of the jungle.
Now a sophomore at HPU and now living away from home for the past six years, Taylorsville hasn't quite lost the love I have for it but I have learned a lot. This Christmas Break has been an eye opener for me and my small town. I realized that I go to a university that is just a little more than twice the size of my hometown, I have more friends that live in more states than most people have ever seen. But this has been my first long break from school that I have been able to drive myself home which meant I got to drive through my country side by myself... just me and the country. Now that feeling is somehting that I wouldn't trade for the world and it is one of the reasons that Taylorsville still has a spot in my heart.
