I never thought to characterize my hometown until I had been at college for a few months.

And even so, I know I saw it differently then than right after I left, and certainly differently than when I was growing up.

I grew up in what I consider a big small town — several small cities and townships adjacent to one another. You always knew where you were and yet you didn't know where one city ended and another began.

You lived anywhere between 5 and 40 minutes from all of your friends and you certainly knew the fastest way to get there.

You had a car, or your parents had a car that you drove, because again it was a big small town and you needed to get around.

Regardless of where you lived exactly, there's a good chance you knew where traffic backed up in the mornings before school and you knew which streets to avoid on the way home between 3:30 and 7, because that's when everyone else was also leaving.

You could always point to the nearest gas station, Starbucks, Leo's Coney Island, gym, movie theater, or school, and you knew which schools were rivals.

You worked hard, and your friends did too. Everyone worked hard, because it was no ordinary town and people desperately wanted to succeed. It was competitive to say the least, but I think that was important. People were grounded and they grew, and they were shaped by an atmosphere unbeknownst to them at the time.

You knew someone everywhere you went. And they knew you.

You knew your friends' grandparents and cousins by name. You see them at the grocery store. And there's a good chance you've ran into an old elementary school sports coach or teacher several times at the same place.

You've cried there and laughed and aged. You've exercised, eaten, learned, and prospered. You've stayed up all night because you procrastinated on a school project and you've thought to yourself, everyone within a ten-mile radius of me is sleeping right now. I am the only one left.

So what can you make of all of this?

There is a great deal of nostalgia in the hometown bubble, because at every corner is a memory, a drive, a dance, a laugh, a dinner, a shop—maybe there's nothing, but still that's something to you.

The memories may look different in retrospect, but regardless of how ridiculous, wrong, dangerous, or happy they were, they contained a certain amount of innocence that you won't ever get back.

Because they happened ever so wistfully there—in the place you grew up, in the place you were once a child, in the place you changed. The place that you will not be able to explain to your college friends or colleagues or after-college friends or maybe even your future family.

You had to be there.

You had to be there for every snowy morning drive to school, every fourth of July at the lake, graduations, birthdays, sporting events, lunch outings, and parties. For the stores and diners and pride and people.

And those who weren't there may not understand any of this, though there is a good chance that they too experienced something very much like it in their own hometown.

You may not return to the place it all began but do remember fondly, if you can, because chances are you were shaped in some way — whether you like it or not — by some aspect of that big small town that you wanted to escape at one time.

I will offer one more thought. Our memories change in retrospect—this, I believe is true. My perspective on my hometown is not necessarily truth. But it is how I see it now and it is, undoubtedly, different from how I saw it then.

I may remember it differently in 20 years, or five years, or next year. I may live there in 35 years or I may live thousands of miles away. And this too may change my perspective.

But one thing I hope does not change is my view of the people— the best and the worst of them. Not necessarily because they are the greatest people in my life—though I must say, many of them are — but simply because we share a home in common. A home I won't be able to describe to those who didn't live there. A home that is home to many—one that changes with the seasons and years, as people move in, out, and around.

One that will remain long after I'm gone and one that will be waiting when I return.