Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my family moved around a fair amount of times. From Maryland to Virginia to Ohio to Kentucky to South Carolina, early on I accumulated a complicated answer to the question people always tend to ask, “So where are you from?” But one common factor that all of my homes seemed to share was that I always ended up in a “small town.” Everyone knows what I mean by this -- it’s the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, the kind of place where it counts as an excused tardy when you got stuck behind a tractor on the way to school, where teenagers have bonfires every weekend because there’s hardly anything else to do, where the town quarry is where all the “popular” kids hang out and where Friday night football was the highlight of the week, even if your school’s team sucked.
Because of all these small-scale benefits and the lack of “glamour,” the vast majority of the angsty teenagers that are “stuck” in these kinds of towns perpetually complain about how boring it is and how they can’t wait to escape to the “real world” one day -- I myself am counted in this percentage. And this longing for a differing future consumed me. I stopped living in the present and could only think about how happy I would be once I got out. I was constantly in such a rush to grow up and become a part of anything other than what I was already a part of that I took for granted everything that all the simple things that my small home towns had to offer. When I lived in Kentucky, I was so eager to move to South Carolina, and after the allure of being new in South Carolina, I was so eager to leave for college. And in brutal honesty, once I got to college, I obtained a sense of superiority because I was finally in a bigger city and left behind all my small towns. But as I’m getting older and reflecting on what has made me into who I am now, I’m finally beginning to see that these once-godforsaken places taught me so much that I couldn’t have learned anywhere else, and they’ll always be a part of me no matter where I go.
The beauty of small towns are so often overlooked and written off, but I’ve begun to gain a new appreciation for them. Their simplicity taught me how to think outside of the mediocre box of being handed “fun,” which is how I learned to create my own forms of entertainment. And the sense of community is unmatched -- people genuinely care about your well-being because they know your family and they literally watched you grow up. For example, I recently received a birthday card in the mail from my home town church saying they miss me, hope I’m doing well and have a happy 20th -- this is not something you can come by just anywhere, and it made me feel so loved. In addition, no matter how far you stray or what other things you get into, your high school friends will always hold a special place in your heart even if you don’t keep in contact like you used to. Catching up with them when you visit home honestly interest you, and you actually want to know their real answer to, “How have you been?” There is a serious lack of superficiality that is sadly prevalent in bigger places that you don’t find all over a small town, and it it is so refreshing. And apart from the people-based perks, the fresh air and the clear view of the stars at night are things you’ll never get in a city.
I regret ever thinking I was too good for a small town. Please, if you live in the kind of place where everyone knows your name, a place where driving around doing nothing counts as having real plans, a place where after-school mudding in the cotton field is actually a thing, don’t take it for granted. Enjoy where you are while you’re there, and bloom wherever you’re planted. So thank you, Sykesville, Maryland; Lynnhaven, Virginia; Barlow-Vincent, Ohio; LaGrange, Kentucky, and Aiken, South Carolina, for shaping me into the person I am today, who I am so proud to be. No matter where I go or what endeavors I get involved in, I will always be glad to have been a part of you, as you are a part of me.
