1. Everyone Waves to You
Every time I am walking and a car passes me, we exchange a friendly wave. It never occurred to me that this wasn't normal everywhere until I was walking with a friend and they asked me, "do you know that person?" Where I'm from you don't have to know them to be friendly to them.
2. Bonfires Every Weekend
In the summer this is actually the case almost every day. My friend's snapchat stories were filled with pictures of them snuggled up with someone by a fire. But if you're truly from a small town you know it isn't a bonfire until the flames are as tall as you.
3. Everyone Knows Everything About You
In a small town, news gets around fast. That news gets around even faster when your mom is a cashier at the local grocery store. Every day she would come home and tell me all the new gossip and I'm sure half of the town knew who I was just from my mom bragging about me to customers.
4. Blinking Stoplights
My small town is marked by two stoplights; blink and you just might miss it. You also know that after a certain time that the stoplights begin to blink, meaning you can drive right through them. The times change from summer to winter of when this is activated, but if you were me you knew exactly when that happened as my parents always told me to be home before this happened.
5. Stargazing
Where I'm from we can see every star imaginable and I've made a personal goal to one day know most of the constellations. That way I can always tell how big an area it is by their light pollution. One of the first things I do when I visit a new small town is wait until it's dark to look up at the stars and find out how many I can see. Few places have as many stars as we do.
6. Yearly Festivals
Every small town has something that put them on the map and they have a festival to commemorate it. For my town it's the Night of the Living Dead Festival. The movie with the same name was filmed long ago in our local farms and even though the movie is black and white with somewhat horrible acting we all love it because that's what makes us famous.
If you're like me you will one day be excited to leave your small town but like a gravitational force you will always return to it because there is no other place like the one you were raised in.
