You Know You Live in a Small Town When:

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You Know You Live in a Small Town When:

The “road hog” in front of you on Main Street is a farmer’s combine.

Third Street is on the edge of town.

You don’t use your turn signals because everyone knows where you are going.

A baby born on June 14 receives gifts from local merchants as the first baby of the year.

You speak to each dog you pass by name and he wags his tail at you.

You drive into the ditch five miles out of town and the word gets back before you do.

You dial a wrong number and talk for 15 minutes anyway.

You can’t walk for exercise because every car that passes you offers you a ride.

You miss a Sunday at church and receive a get-well card.

Someone asks you how you feel and listens to what you say.

People think that your town is cultually diverse because you have both a Luthern and a Catholic Church in it!

Thank God for small towns and the people who live in them.
 
You know you live in a small town when:
  1. Somebody mailing you a letter completely mangles your address, but it gets to you anyway.
  2. You move from one home to another within the same town, and the Post Office keeps forwarding your mail years after the forwarding order expires.
  3. You decide to go for a walk, and five different people pull their cars over and ask you if you need a lift.
  4. You decide to go for a walk, and every driver that passes you waves to you.
I used to live in a small town. There were lots of nice things about it, but I now live in the city – houses here cost about half of what they cost in the small town, and I couldn’t afford it there. And my urban parish is friendlier to single people than the small-town one was. 🙂
 
True Story

I lived in a very small town for my freshman year of high school. I started the year late, so I got all of my text books the same day. At lunch, I was trying to juggle all of those books and my food tray, and ended up dropping all of it.

When I got home from school that afternoon, my mom had a sandwich and snacks ready for me. She said, “I heard you dropped your lunch today, so I figured you must be pretty hungry.” :eek:

Word does travel fast in small towns!
 
Your children know not to get into trouble because you will know before they get home.

Everyone treats the local high school play as if it was put on Broadway.

If you forget and leave something on, you just call your neighbor to go turn it off. He doesn’t need a key, no one locks their door.

If your house burns down, by the next day not only will you have a place to live but it will be furnished and everything donated to you will take up two empty office buildings in town. You will get everything you need as you think of it except a broom. (happened to me)

If you are gone, your garden gets watered anyway even if you forgot to ask.
 
You know you live in a small town when:

High school sports results are front-page news.

The police blotter includes such “crimes” as “tortoise found crossing road”, “squirrel in chimney”, or “wallet found in front yard”. 🙂
 
We live out in the country on an acerage. We need to follow gravel road ettiquite. You need to wave to everyone you pass, whether you know them or not.

Yes, our 4 page newspaper is basically an extention of the school newspaper - there’s nothing else to report. Ok, every few weeks there is an obituary or two, but that’s about it.

We very seldomly lock our front door. Only if we’re going to be away for 3-4 days, then we do.
 
I grew up on a farm, not even in a small town! These are so true.
  • People’s birthdays, graduations are written up by the local paper’s columnists- and all the public schools have columns
  • People you don’t recognize know your parents, and ask how the crops are
  • Just about everyone in a 10km radius babysat you when you were a kid
  • You stick out like a sore thumb if you are in a small-town parish not your own
-Until I went to univ. I never bothered closing my bedroom window’s blinds :whistle:
  • The fire dept. is called to your house and you hear about it before you get home from school, from a kid who’s dad is a volunteer firefighter (don’t worry it was a controlled fire!)
-Instead of making you go to the post office to sign for registered mail, the mail lady drives up to the house and gives it to you

-You get suspicious when you don’t recognize the car passing your house

Mommyof4 “You dial a wrong number and talk for 15 minutes anyway”- this actually happened to my sister! 😛

Ah, the rural life!
 
When there is a funeral, the Priest calls the school needing altar boys and the principal comes and drafts you and gives you a ride to the Church.

When it is your week to serve daily Mass you are excused to be late to school without a call from your mother. The secretary just takes a bulletin to school.

You don’t lock your house and have a clipboard on your work bench in the garage so you know who borrowed your tools.

When your mother (dad never stopped by the post office) is sick or out of town, the post mistress brings your mail to the house on her way home from work. She also puts more stamps on your letters if you don’t have enough on them and then collects the next time she sees you.

You never knew that a mailman was someone who carried mail to your house. You thought he was the guy who delivered mail in the country in his International Scout.

The busiest day of the week was sale day at the livestock auction or when there was a funeral, except when there was a funeral, the school was the only place that stayed open.

When puppies are born, you have to go to the big city to the pet shop to get rid of them. Everyone in town already has a dog.
 
Years ago we had **a **human operator, before dials. She automatically forwarded your calls to where ever you were visiting at the moment.
 
CarolAnnSFO said:
  1. Somebody mailing you a letter completely mangles your address, but it gets to you anyway.
Click to expand...
This is so true!!
adrift said:
If you forget and leave something on, you just call your neighbor to go turn it off. He doesn’t need a key, no one locks their door.
Click to expand...
And so is this
CarolAnnSFO said:
I used to live in a small town. There were lots of nice things about it, but I now live in the city … And my urban parish is friendlier to single people than the small-town one was. 🙂
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Alas, this is also true.

As you can see, I’m a small-town resident no longer, but I miss it from time to time…
 
Your neighbor who comments, Oh, I’m not from here, was actually born in a town 5 miles away.
 
Your then 7 yr old daughter breaks her leg jumping on a neighbor’s trampoline. She’s rushed to the hospital by EMS (a few neighbors), she ends up spending the night in the hospital. The following morning, she’s discharged in her full body cast. In the meantime, a “handicap” ramp is built on her front porch by another neighbor. Her first grade teacher walks over during her lunch hour bringing letters from her class. Lunch, dinner and babysitting is provided by more neighbors for many weeks to come.

true story - here in NJ, three years ago this April.
 
Sounds like fun to those of us who have never lived in a town smaller than a million people!
 
… 20 years from now you’ll still be known as “the new family that moved into Bessie Brown’s old house.”
 
Your boyfriend comes over to visit (before you guys are dating) and all the neighbors are asking about him.

When meeting you, people always say, “You’re the girl who sings at church and gives Communion!” (since mostly everyone in our town is Catholic)

Your chemistry teacher is also your mom’s best friend and your sister’s godmother (no joke!)

Your mom knows every woman in town.

You know your boyfriend will get mobbed at prom (because you’re long distance and your friends haven’t met him yet)

Random people ask you if you’re the one who converted to Catholicism a couple years back.

Your neighbors keep an eye out for you when you go out for a walk (while unable to hear anything, due to the volume of your iPod)

Mostly everyone has the same ethnic background (mostly Irish, Italian, and Portuguese where I live)

You always get recognized as someone’s friend, sister, daughter, or girlfriend by everyone you met.

If you ever do anything wild, it will be all over the town in less than five minutes.
 
Your two major businesses in town are the Farmers Co-op and the school.

Your local school is all one building, and it houses kids from preschool on up to 12. And most of the kids know each other. And so do the parents.
 
You can’t play hookey without your teacher knowing where you went when you come back to class the next day.

Everyone knows what grades you get, what your father does for a living, what stupid thing you did last summer, etc.
 
bluerose said:
… 20 years from now you’ll still be known as “the new family that moved into Bessie Brown’s old house.”
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Yes!!!
My favorite, though, is that when people say anything about any married woman in town, they always call her by her maiden name. Mary Brown & John Smith can be married for 30 & 40 years, but when they are still called Mary Brown & John Smith…becasue that’s the name that everybody knows you by.
You know? Like at the post office, somebody says that John Smith fell & broke his ankle, & at least 3 people will ask: “John Smith? Isn’t that who married Mary Brown?”
 
Zooey said:
Yes!!!
My favorite, though, is that when people say anything about any married woman in town, they always call her by her maiden name. Mary Brown & John Smith can be married for 30 & 40 years, but when they are still called Mary Brown & John Smith…becasue that’s the name that everybody knows you by.
You know? Like at the post office, somebody says that John Smith fell & broke his ankle, & at least 3 people will ask: “John Smith? Isn’t that who married Mary Brown?”
Click to expand...
Ah, yes . . . and then there is “she was a” as in: "You know Marie, she was a Vanderzante . . . " (Guess you can tell my small town was a Dutch settlement!) For some reason, these conversations were nearly always about dead people, so we had to talk about their families so the younger people knew who we were talking about!

MJ
 
“Crash! Tinkle-tinkle (sound of glass breaking)”

“DON’T THINK YOU’LL GET AWAY WITH THIS!!! I KNOW YOUR FATHER!!!”

Ugh. The woes of living in a small town. I know them too well.

Some college buddies of my brothers once were driving through town. They stopped in front of a bar where there were some patrons milling about. Rolling down the window, they asked, “Where does Frank live?” They then received complete instructions on how to get to our house. Only after arriving did they realize that they never stated the last name, nor where they asked, “Frank who?”

One of my brothers got “busted” by the front page of the newspaper. We had just received an incredible amount of rain in a single dumping and the storm sewers backed up. My brother and his freinds drove about town in my Dad’s vehicle, running through all the biggest puddles they could hit. A newspaper photographer was “at large” and caught the vehicle in the middle of a puddle with a spectacular fountain of water spraying up from the tires. It was obvious that my brother did not slow down for the puddle. The photo made the front page and my Dad immediately recognized his own vehicle in picture because there just were no other vehicles as such in town.
 
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